Neighbor

by Will Lupens

A UFO suicide-cult survivor; a precocious zoo-hater; a man who would prefer to live in a box; a group of underacheiving angels; a boy who speaks the language of infomercials; a certain squinty-eyed President. These are some of the characters inhabiting Will Lupens’ debut collection of stories. They have little in common apart from the neighborhood they share, a neighborhood marked not by physical boundaries but by the proximity of its inhabitants to seemingly insignificant events and details that haunt and define them. A place where distant memories plague reality, where matter intrudes upon the sanctuary of dreams, where the possibly dead discover that their lives resemble giant balls of lint.

Genres: Short Stories

218 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2005

About the author

Will Lupens has worked as a forklift operator, software developer, lawn mower and surrogate rough-houser, among other things. He writes in Somerville, Massachusetts, where lives with his wife and son and his two enormous ears.

Read an interview with the author.

Reviews

[Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Self-published writing is a bit of a gamble, in my experience. Maybe I was expecting a different style of short stories, but some of these read more like a form of poetry, with the focus more on how the sentences sound than what they convey to the reader. If a person were to speak like the narrator, I would say they enjoyed the sound of their own voice (and were a bit pretentious). I couldn't get through one of the stories ("mother of god") at all because of this, though I tried multiple times.

The stories themselves varied a lot in tone, and ranged from perfectly capturing the feeling of dissociation, to painful navel-gazing, to engrossing in the way that a slow-motion car crash would be. My favorites would have to be: "sulu" (which I find myself thinking back to often), "mist" (which was a pleasant rest stop between chapters), and "collector of worlds" (which had me continually reminding myself that the stories were fictional, because the narrator was so repellant). "world made flesh 2.0" and "grim(m)" are close runners up, I enjoyed the slightly more tongue-in-cheek tone of these two.

It felt a bit like some of the stories were written as a way to process some stuff about childhood and/or parenthood, strange dreams, or a deeply pessimistic outlook on life. An upbeat read this is not, but it's pretty engrossing at times and at least interesting/unusual at others.

[Kirsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well told stories with a sophisticated vocabulary.

I love this book!