Emporium

by Adam Johnson

An ATF raid, a moonshot gone wrong, a busload of female cancer victims determined to live life to the fullest—these are the compelling terrains Adam Johnson explores in his electrifying debut collection. A lovesick teenage Cajun girl, a gay Canadian astrophysicist, a teenage sniper on the LAPD payroll, a post-apocalyptic bulletproof-vest salesman—each seeks connection and meaning in landscapes made uncertain by the voids that parents and lovers should fill. With imaginative grace and verbal acuity, Johnson is satirical without being cold, clever without being cloying, and heartbreaking without being sentimental. He shreds the veneer of our media-saturated, self-help society, revealing the lonely isolation that binds us all together.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Satire, American, Science Fiction, Fantasy

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Adam Johnson was born in South Dakota and raised in Arizona. He earned a BA in Journalism from Arizona State University in 1992; a MFA from the writing program at McNeese State University, in 1996; and a PhD in English from Florida State University in 2000. Johnson is currently a San Francisco writer and associate professor in creative writing at Stanford University.

He founded the Stanford Graphic Novel Project and was named "one of the nation's most influential and imaginative college professors" by Playboy Magazine. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, and The Paris Review. He is the author of Emporium, a short story collection and the novel, Parasites Like Us, which won the California Book Award. His most recent novel, The Orphan Master's Son, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Reviews

[Rae Meadows · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man, can Adam Johnson write. (I have not yet read The Orphan Master's Son, for which he won the Pulitzer, though I plan to.) In the stories of this book, Johnson creates worlds that are off kilter, some downright bizarre, and his prose zings, barely containable on the page. Johnson's creative gifts are on full display, which at times I will admit, I was resistant to. I found myself wary of the anti-realism, not that he doesn't do it beautifully.

Having been thoroughly wowed by his writing, I will also say that I wasn't much moved by this book. Most of the stories have a heavy male vibe to them, not that there's anything wrong with that, but maybe on an emotional level, I felt a distance. There is a strong father/son theme throughout. The three stories I found the most fulfilling: The Jughead of Berlin (the one female protagonist),Your Own Backyard, and the final story The Eighth Sea.

Definitely recommended.

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson seeks connection with this one or his characters do. And in three of the stories I felt this connection as a reader too. My three favourites, Teen Sniper, Your Own Backyard and The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite drove the point for me. The others maybe less so but still flashes from those stories keep flashing in my mind from time to time.

Like with any other connections stories sometimes create a strong thread, other times the thread is more fragile or even gets lost. Johnsons gives different scenarios, some of them quite sci fi and uses them to explore how the outside environment presses on our needs, our connection to others which we need to be. So we end up fighting the outside which keeps us from the connection we need.

My favourite stories get 5 stars the other 3 stars - so I'm averaging out at 4 stars.

Read with Maya

Teen Sniper - This is an Ode to the Gun - maybe a sarcastic one, at least I sure hope so. Johnson shows how easy it is for priorities to become askew and so human connection too becomes askewed.

Your Own Backyard Wolf - wild, hurt or just bad?

The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite it's sad and funny, and hopeful and not and angry and smiling - it's alive. Funny how we end up living only when we get the date of our death.

[Evan Leach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adam Johnson's debut short story collection shows tantalizing potential. Johnson is a talented writer, and the prose on display here is strong. There is also great creativity in these stories, which feature teenage sniper experts, busloads of hard-partying cancer patients, a top-secret Canadian space program, and much more. My favorite entries (Teen Sniper and the Canadanaut) also feature sneaky-funny humor reminiscent of George Saunders; indeed, these stories are so similar to some of Saunders' work that it seems likely that he was a major influence on Johnson.

However, as much promise as this collection shows, Johnson is still a developing talent at this point. Most of these stories intrigue, but don't quite come together in a satisfying or fulfilling way. They tend to feel like pieces put together by a very talented MFA student still finding himself as a writer, which is probably what some of these stories more or less are.

Overall, this is an interesting collection that Johnson's fans may enjoy, but his best was definitely yet to come. 3.5 stars.

[Maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read three of his books this year I can say that Adam Johnson is my favorite contemporary author. His stories are never conventional, sometimes venturing deep into the weird where the resulting reaction could vary from laughter to strong dislike. But what I come back to his stories for is the compassion and kindness to his characters and their troubles which are always present in his voice.

Emporium for me was not as great as Johnson’s later collection of short stories, Fortune Smiles, but it was still very good. The prevailing themes here were the pains of growing into adulthood and the relationship (or the lack of it) between a parent and their child so most stories left me feeling melancholic. However, I didn’t really connect with couple of the stories.

Favorite in the collection: Teen Sniper. I also loved Your Own Backyard, and The Eight Sea.

Read with Sofia, Nov 2016.

3.5 stars

[Rupert · Rating 4 out of 5]

The characters in Emporium, Adam Johnson's first book of stories, have a "newer, more optimistic vocabulary for violence." This is what Lt. Kim tells Tim, the teen police sniper, he will achieve through positive visualization during his kills in the lead story "Teen Sniper."

Tim and most of the other absurd, almost nightmare humans that people Johnson's collection could be hard-partying nephews of Crash author J.G. Ballard's more claustrophobic visions of the human race. Or, considering that most of these stories are dark satires, maybe more like distant cousins of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club members. They've gone so far past the apocalypse that in "Trauma Plate" nostalgia is reserved for mom-and-pop bulletproof-vest rental shops competing with the Body Armor Emporium down the road.

Like Ballard and Palahniuk, Johnson attempts to portray the new mythologies seeping up from the concrete in these heady days of unrestrained violence and capitalism. What is the new iconography that speaks to the deep part of our souls, souls that might not ever wander into forests until teen years but watch bloody dismemberment almost daily, and whose group communions most often take place at the "emporium," aka the mall?

But while Ballard's characters are more likely to be found crouching behind a burnt-out fuselage cradling a rifle and hallucinating, Johnson's are still fairly grounded in a world most of us would recognize, albeit secondhand. Take, for example, "The Jughead of Berlin," his tale about a girl taking a last joy ride with her dad before the feds raids their home for illegal gambling equipment. To complicate matters, the girl is in love with an ROTC boy who will be along on the raid. Or "The History of Cancer," the story of the preteen narrator and his buddy Ralph, who spend their days sorting the colored tiles that Ralph's dad pilfers from work. The first time the narrator meets Ralph's mom "she hooked a thumb behind the elastic band of her velour shorts and pulled them down to the stubble of her pubic hair so she could show me her still-fresh hysterectomy scar. This was to demonstrate why I was to stay quiet in her house, make my own sandwiches, and not slam that damn ball against the carport."

That said, Johnson displays the Ballard-like tendency to find just as much poetry in carnage and technology as in nature. Consider these lines from an ex-cop in "Your Own Backyard": "On Traffic [duty], you'll see pelvic wings unfold against steering columns. There'll be breast plates you can see light through, dentures imbedded in dashboards." "Your Own Backyard" is the most chilling of the stories: Its protagonist, an ex-cop who now culls animals for a zoo, seems to have already lost his 5-year-old son to cold-blooded sociopathy. When a wolf (a lot of wolves, rifles, and planes appear in these stories) sprays the son, you're not sure if the wolf is accepting the son as one of its own or putting him in his place.

The dad in "Your Own Backyard" is one of about a half-dozen ineffectual pater familias that populate these pages. Along with all the restrained-wolf imagery and technology gone haywire, there is a strong undercurrent of hairy male juju. The teen in "The Cliff Gods of Acapulco" learns about African gods that take human form and sleep with women, then change back, leaving a son who is "a semigod, with small powers he doesn't understand, and like his father, he's a roamer, with one wing in heaven, one foot on earth, doomed to wander toward every distant mud city that appears golden in his half-divine sight." "His real father might be a bird or a storm, sea-beast or lion," another character muses, "so this typical young man . . . must learn to find his fathers where he can."

It is in the stories where Johnson balances the human comedy against the crush of technology, however, that his voice is most his own, as in "Teen Sniper," the collection's gem. The title character is a prodigy at sniping--"won the Disney Classic at age eleven." His best friend is a bomb-sniffing robot for whose birthday the sniper buys a programming update--"Negotiator 5.0, with the latest Black English Converters--because ROMS wants to express himself." The one problem the talented teen has is that he can't help having empathy for his marks.

And human empathy offers a note of hope in the collection's final story. The young protagonist of "The Eighth Sea," who has been sentenced to "Adult Redirection" meetings after a drunk-and-disorderly arrest, reports to a job site to repair a backyard wall smashed by a horrific car accident. Seeing groceries and condoms scattered in the detritus, he can't help but imagine the small world ended by this unforeseen event. Perhaps simple human concern is one of the few constants in a world of ever-mutating dystopia; as long as people can look outside themselves and consider the plight of others, there is a chance of triggers not pulled, bombs not launched, and plagues not spread.

[Kate Fitzgerald · Rating 3 out of 5]

While you can see the promise of his later writing, this debut from 2002 was not there yet. This is a collection of short stories. They are all unconventional, which is his style, but way too cryptic. It took me a long time to read because I was often confused and had to flip back to earlier passages. Most of the characters were kept at a distance, so the meh people in unclear situations was not compelling.

Each story is worthwhile if you read one every few months. Not back to back. And if you're checking out the author for the first time, don't use Emporium as your intro.

[Karen Michele Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a wonderful literary experience attending the Orcas Island Lit Festival last weekend. Adam Johnson was one of the talented authors I had a chance to hear interviewed. I have read The Orphan Master's Son and Fortune Smiles, so I purchased Emporium for the signing and to read and enjoy his early work. One of the best features of the collection was the variety which kept my interest and showed the range of writing ability Johnson has to offer. At the festival, he told a story of his early life going to the zoo with his father who had a night job there. One of the stories in the book told this story in a different way and it was my favorite of the collection. The voice of Johnson’s storytelling ability came through loud and clear!

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty strong collected by Adam Johnson here. Emporium would be an enjoyable read for anyone. Off the top of my head, it's hard not to be moved by "Trauma Plate," "Teen Sniper" (the opening story), or "The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite." Most (but not all?) of these stories are set in a near-future where the world gets a little less inhumane as a response to awful things that occur in the world. People turn to drastic measures once the world feels less accommodating. For example, "Teen Sniper" is the story of a future where teenage mercenaries are hired to snipe people in hostage situations when there's no other option for negotiation. And in "Trauma Plate," crime has gotten so bad that people take to wearing bulletproof vests to protect themselves. This is the story, told from three perspectives, about a family who owns a mom-and-pop bulletproof vest store and how they're coping with the extreme violence. Good, amazingly written collection.

[George Ilsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing is strong and imaginative, but never drew me in. I felt distanced, and my rating reflects that. Many of the stories also suffer from the "undisclosed first person narrator syndrome" whereby we are given little information. The first story I read in this collection was The Canadanaut, which was an unfortunate introduction, since I am Canadian. (Is this narrator male? Female? Who knows?) While witty it perhaps would be wittier to someone who was less familiar with Canada. For example, I expected the french Canadian character would be revealed as someone who was only pretending to be french, because his french was so cartoonish. Turns out much of the collection was cartoonish is a satirical kind of way. Beautiful amazing writing, as I say, but failed to draw me in.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the last paragraph of each story and you will get the pithy message all wrapped up. Many of these simply don’t feel like fully completed stories. “Teen Sniper” is about a teen sniper. “In Your Own Backyard” is probably my favorite story of the bunch as a former cop, current night patrolman at the zoo, tries to do what it takes to reign in his unruly son. Unlike Johnson’s brilliant Fortune Smiles collection, I don’t see a single story I will revisit or remember much a few months down the line. To see Johnson’s true ability, check out “Dark Meadow” dark as can be but truly original and brilliant writing.

C

[Rashaan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are four seamless and wildly inventive tales that illustrate excellent story-telling. This book is also a wonderful classroom text for College Reading Development. Students have consistently responded positively to reading those four stories, and many in-depth and thought provoking class discussions have been spurred by: "Teen Sniper," "Your Own Backyard," "Trauma Plate" and "The Jughead of Berlin." Highly recommended read for studying and appreciating the craft of fiction and to spark reading interest in basic skills curriculum.

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book struck me as a bad impression of the contemporary Ironic Male Short Story Writer. Even the diction seemed loosely formed and without a certain urgency I look for in short stories.

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of stories that suffer from running a little long and trying to do a little much, heap on just a few too many details and tricks and twists so that things feel a bit too busy. Venture often into that George Saunders-esque wacky-near-future sort of territory but do so competently (reminiscent of what I've read of Jim Shepherd, too). Feel a bit off the mark (ha?) or overdone in stories like "Teen Sniper" but get more effectively to the heart (again, ha?) in those such as "Trauma Plate." Other highlights: A high-school graduate tries to find his way into really living life while chauffeuring cancer patients on a night out in "The Death-dealing Cassini Satellite"; a man unravels his relationship with his father and step-father while recalling summer shenanigans involving a caiman and a wind tunnel years ago with a friend in "Cliff Gods of Acapulco"; a Louisiana girl experiences her first taste of love and want ahead of an ATF raid on her smuggler father in "The Jughead of Berlin"; the Canadians shoot for the moon in the wild "Canadanaut" and a young man first experiences life's complications alongside a married woman at court-ordered counseling for alcoholism, his brick-laying father, and the Power Team in "The Eighth Sea," the closer and probably strongest piece in the collection.

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing in Emporium is technically good. There were some sentences that were so original, so strange or funny that I actually stopped to savour them. This is rare. I can understand why so many reviewers thought this was some sort of genius debut.

But.

The stories were repetitive, cocky, and hyper masculine. If you're a pretentious guy you might really enjoy them! Too many similar things kept popping up: cool vehicles (flashy sports cars, airplanes, motorcycles, and spaceships); guns, bulletproof vests, and even a death ray; wolves and other wild and exotic animals; masturbating, dispassionate sex scenes (including one that took place in some sort of zero gravity bungee jump/flight simulator thing); the deserts and metropolises of Arizona; bad relationships with fathers. The pacing was horrendously slow, despite how "cool" the author tried to be. There was never much point to any of the stories, unless it was to end with some profound yet ironic statement about life that seemed like an afterthought. Of the nine stories, only three of them had much of a plot ("Teen Sniper," "The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite," and "The Canadanaut").

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of amusing but unsatisfying stories by the great Adam Johnson, written while he was trying to discipline his voice and work through his obsessions. As a young writer, he could compose some of the funniest sentences in the history of the English language (I can't quote it without getting kicked off Goodreads, but the scene from "Cananaut" in which a military hooker exposes her private parts to the Arctic cold had me cackling loud enough to wake the neighbor's sleeping infant), but strung them together into sloppy, overlong stories that end about five pages before closing line. He was also fascinated with father-son relationships, Arizona, aimless boys in their late teens, and cars, which reappear time and again in the "Emporium" collection and make it a bit monochromatic. But the author is obviously gifted enough to achieve brilliance if he hones his talents into skills. And over time, he did.

[Amal · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection is a bit entertaining however the stories were slow and quite unsatisfying. I felt very distanced from the characters, I was never drawn in and couldn't properly imagine or feel the situations. The stories were also pointless and incomplete, the writer tried to add some twists and details but they just weren't interesting. Out of the whole collection maybe two or three stories were actually nice but again, not satisfying at all.
Never read any novel for this author but the collection sucks.

[Heather Warner · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5 stars*. Very interesting debut collection of short stories. They are all definitely creative and some are down right bizarre which made them fun to read. Great world building in each story and characters that I wanted to know better. I just felt that some more emotion/feeling was needed in most of the characters but overall this is an enjoyable book and one that I recommend if you are looking for something a bit different.

[Matt Kovalcik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Varied locations, narrators, characters, but always with a serene balance of dread and ... hope? The stories are engaging and leave you both wanting more and content with the snapshot into the lives Johnson lays bare. Oddities and sci-fi aspects only lend to the weird and enjoyable tone. Never been disappointed with Johnson.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson is one talented writerI have read his later works fit SR but in this relatively short collection of stories you see the talent. Set in a vaguely twisted future this collection written 15 years pre The Parkland massacre shows where we might be headed. Great sentences and great tales. There may be better writers than Johnson but let me know because I want to read them

[Walter Heape · Rating 3 out of 5]

This may be a DNF for me. I am trying. While I admire Johnson’s writing, these stories just aren’t for me. Such a masculine world, dripping with guns and armor and black metal … it’s bleak and boring. Is it that I am just not the audience for these stories, or that Johnson isn’t doing his job by hooking me even though I’m way outside my comfort/interest level? I don’t know.

[Zeba Clarke · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this collection slow and self-regarding. Other people might love them, but the stories seemed inconclusive and a bit pointless. Perhaps that is indicative of the lives of the characters/society, but it seemed like classic MFA in creative writing style and the twists felt gimmicky.

[Colin Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit too madcap for it's own good sometimes - certainly falls prey to the modern obsession with idiosyncratic detail (teenage sniper, Canadian Scientists working on a Death Ray, etc.) but at it's best it transcends all it's overly whacked out details. The endings are especially good.

[Ben Brackett · Rating 4 out of 5]

More Saunders-esce then I had expected based on his other collection and novels.

[Warren Hoffman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Johnson's other work but this collection was majorly underwhelming.

[Alexis Goebel · Rating 5 out of 5]

AMAZING!

[Angel Baeza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hit ot miss for me. My favorite was THE DEATH DEALING CASSINI SATELLITE. But that was when the sci-fi took a step back to make way for a particular setting instead

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are engaging, sharp stories that point to great potential in Johnson’s writing.

[Paul Frandano · Rating 5 out of 5]

As many readers will already know from The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson is a Wizard. Period. He may write the sharpest, most magical sentences of any American writing today. He creates mad, quasi-futuristic dystopias and renders them plausibly, in detail. He seems an omnivorous sponge as well as an indefatigable researcher: no one could carry as much arcane knowledge - erecting and mortaring in a wall, police sniping MO, the technology of Kevlar vests, culling the collection at the local zoo, airplane pilot checkout and flight routines, and much more - swirling around in his head. Strange, widely varied stories but with many common threads - loneliness, an essential humanity, surreal implausible premises made plausible, guns, either used or hanging on a Chekov wall, orange peels and their very light weight when dried - all good. And then Johnson develops his tales, luring a reader in often through sheer strangenesss. (The sublime often has an element of strangeness about it, doesn't it?)

One consistency that comes through loud and clear in a story collection but would imperceptible had you read each of these over a period of years in various literary periodicals is that the narrator of every story has essentially the same voice, Johnson's own elegant, observant one, be that narrator a horny teenager, a grounded pilot, a sniper, a physicist, a bricklayer, an office clerk, whatever. Is this a flaw? I compare Johnson to, say, literary shapeshifter David Mitchell, who gives unique voices, phrasing, idiosyncrasies to his unusual characters. But this is Johnson's first collection, and his own voice - uniquely powerful, uncommonly inventive, dryly funny, humor that pops up, almost invariably by surpise, in odd places and circumstances, a sad yet tenderly resigned sensibility - is captivating. Moreover, all but one of these stories resists closure: think of a typical New Yorker story, whose conventional critics - particularly in the 1970s-1980s - made the complaint that they read as through the concluding paragraph had been struck out. But Johnson never panders. He challenges his readers to think, as would a strong contemporary poet. The last paragraph may be for the reader to write.

Add that's how Johnson's story structure and style work for me: very like poetry, and not only because his sentences are poetically beautiful. The stories make me pause throughout, and then at their conclusion, to think, relatively hard, with pages flipped back to and reread, about what I just experienced. This is apart from an odd sense of dislocation, but in a place with many familiar elements and motives. I could not go from one story directly to the next. I read the book over a period of some two weeks and found, for the most part, each story to be vaguely unsettling, and something I had to ponder, to satisfying, rewarding effect (There is one exception, "The Canadanaut," the only tale that comes to a conventional close and that is only unsettling until you grasp Johnson's project. Readers with a youthful addiction to Tom Swift, Jr. books will understand.)

In any event, I'm most definitely a fan and believe, very emphatically, that Adam Johnson is a great voice in American fiction who should be read by anyone who loves great, imaginative writing.

[Tyson Vaughan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got to know Adam Johnson a little bit when I was finishing my English degree (with a creative writing emphasis) at Stanford and he was a Stegner Fellow there at the time. Really great guy! This book, Emporium, had just come out, and he was going around, doing readings from it. He signed it for me and encouraged me to keep writing -- "Fiction matters!" he scrawled.

(Well, Adam: sadly, I gave up my writerly dreams for a while, until the pandemic knocked something loose within me -- something dry and shriveled and neglected -- and now I'm watering and nursing that thing back to health as I work on my own novel, so... fist bump!)

That was long before he won the Pulitzer (for The Orphan Master's Son), but everyone already knew Johnson was special. Like a prized basketball recruit, everyone knew it was just a matter of time before he unleashed his championship-winning masterpiece. Well, I finally just started reading The Orphan Master's Son, and it caused me to reminisce and look back on this intriguing collection of his short stories....

The stories here are extremely "voicey" -- the narration crackles with a distinctive verve. It really smacks the reader immediately. Some readers might feel that such voicey narration distracts from the actual narrative, though I love it. Something about the voice and the settings and themes in these stories does feel very much pinned to the late-90s / turn of the millennium, though, so they can feel a bit dated in that sense. Interestingly, I'd say that he dialled back that voicey-ness a bit in The Orphan Master's Son, in which the narration feels more balanced, more mature.

The stories in Emporium offer an unusual combination of dark, wry, absurdist humor and melancholic yearning for human connection. They're commentaries on the hollowness of techno-corporatized North American life at the end of the 20th century. This is how you get funny and weird and sad stories like "Teen Sniper," about a gifted kid whose job is to take out disgruntled Silicon Valley tech workers, and whose only friend is a bomb-sniffing robot. Or "Trauma Plate," about the lonely daughter of a couple whose small, independent body armor shop is under threat from the big-box franchise of a corporate body armor emporium that just came to town.

There's no melodrama here. Big emotional swings are treated with a certain degree of irony or skepticism. Johnson paints with an emotional palette that is subtle and restrained, yet oddly realistic, given the absurd settings and situations he puts his characters in. Still, some readers may find it difficult to fully connect emotionally with many of these stories.

I wouldn't classify these stories as "magical-realist," because they don't really feature the kinds of phenomena we generally think of as "magic." However, in these stories the absurdist element plays an analogous role to the metaphysical elements in magical realism. So, perhaps we might conjure a new category: absurdist-realism. I think that would fit nicely.

I go back and forth on whether this collection merits 4 or 5 stars. I suppose I want to rate it 4.5. Johnson's brilliance as a writer is on display, but it also still feels like he's still developing, like his genius is not quite fully mature yet, like some of these stories are missing a "je ne sais quois" that could have made them even better -- a touch more emotional engagement in exchange for a touch less edgy cleverness and wit, perhaps. I suppose it feels like maybe Johnson is pulling his punches a little bit by restricting his emotional palette. And it very much feels a product of its time (which is neither good nor bad, but just interesting and worth noting). I dunno, maybe I actually wanted a little bit of melodrama here or there. But still, brilliant stuff, well worth a read.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was torn about what rating to give this book - Adam Johnson can write - but I was deeply divided about what to make of the stories and wavered between a three stars and a two or even one. So I will tell what I liked, what I found problematic and finally about the one story which was so bad I was astounded to see that it was ever published.

There are three stories I found particularly good 'The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite', 'Cliff Gods of Acapulco' and 'The Jughead of Berlin', they were totally absorbing, the characters in their faults and complexities believable and I felt, in a way, they had learnt something or been shown something about (to use that old cliché) 'Life the universe and everything'. Those stories are why I like the short story format and always have (going back to my schooldays and discovering masters of the genre like Saki and Sean Ó Faoláin for the first time) that ability to build a believable world in miniature and to tell, apparently simply stories, with incredible skill the most complex and powerful tales.

The stories I found problematic were 'Teen Sniper'. 'Your Own Backyard' and 'Trauma Plate' about a fifteen year old boy employed by the police as a sniper (Johnson has a thing about snipers there is one in 'The Jughead of Berlin' as well), a father who hides his 10(?) year old sons shoes to stop him committing violence on neighbouring children and a couple renting bulletproof vests. All could be described as dystopian as dealing with a society that is falling apart but it isn't clear how much they reflect a reality the author already sees emerging in the present or are they reflections more distant possibilities. Being based in the UK and not having lived or visited the USA in nearly forty years my problems may simply reflect my own cultural blind spots. I wouldn't claim to know the reality of life in the USA and I don't, and haven't read in the last thirty years, enough fiction from the USA to even claim a limited familiarity through literature. For me dystopian is having a fifteen year old killing hostage takers, or a father having to keep his son barefoot to try and limit the havoc he will wrack on other children or a society were people hire bulletproof vests for almost any journey. Maybe nowadays in the USA such things are not horrors, judging by many reviews there is a cultural divide here which may be one of age as well. These stories are brilliantly written but they seem to accept situations as normal that I read as unacceptable.

Finally I can not say how much I hated and found the story 'The Canadanaut' offensive. It was execrable, particularly the grotesque French spouted by the Quebecoise character, as a 15 year old schoolboy I would have been embarrassed to foist such obviously merely word for word English translation as 'French'. No doubt the story was supposed to read as hysterically funny because of the idea of Canadians developing death rays or space exploration - but if almost any other nationality was substituted you would be cringing, correctly, with the stories obvious racist or at least national stereotyping. The French Canadian character was particularly grotesque, barely better then a Dudley Do-Right cartoon.

So that is what I think, or can't make my mind up, about some very good, some very confusing/disturbing and one appalling story.