Troublers

by Rob Walsh, Sebastien Plisson (Illustrations)

The dog is missing. The tap water has suddenly and inexplicably developed a salty taste. The baby has managed its way around the obstacle. The girls wish to leave the playpen. The pirates will soon come ashore. Trouble takes many forms in Rob Walsh's debut collection of stories, from the seemingly banal to the absurd and fantastic, complicating the lives of his characters and inciting a electric turbulence that ambulates these sixteen stories into new and unexpected territory.

"Very seldom anymore do I come across a book that makes me feel like everything-anything-is possible. Troublers does. Walsh's tautly elegant language renders a world at once iconic and strange, one in which every action and sentiment seems lovingly considered, mercilessly dissected, and expertly defamiliarized. A terrific first book, Troublers points to a new way of doing literature."

-Brian Evenson, author of Windeye

Genres: Short Stories

270 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2013

Reviews

[ipsit]

It’s pretty rare that a collection of short stories does anything for me beyond making me feel like I’m watching someone exercise. Rob Walsh, though, comes out of nowhere with Troublers, taking one insane premise after another and exploring them with sentences that catch you off guard at every turn. There’s a story where a guy builds a playpen for his baby daughters and leaves them in the playpen for 40 years, until he dies. There’s a woman who spends years digging a hole in her backyard for no specific reason. There’s a baby who keeps waking its parents up in the middle of the night, touching their bodies strangely. Among the book’s many tricks and traps and desperate people, it is the constantly stunning logic of Walsh's sentences that hold the ship together, at once both aurally resonant and bizarre, like, “By glancing between my own bites, I supervised my wife’s eating.” Overall, a good weapon kit of strange air for people who like Gordon Lish mashed against Matthew Derby and George Saunders after being locked in a closet for five years

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always love writing that travels the border between narrative and thought experiment. I want to be able to enjoy a story and be challenged intellectually at the same time. Rob Walsh writes just like that.

The stories in Troublers occur in a slightly strange world that works on just-off logic. Oftentimes, the stories function like musical variations, but instead of melody, the very thinking of the characters goes through a series of permutations, shifting the logical foundations of the fictional universe. "Universe" is a big word, but it shouldn't imply a large scope. The stories are quite close and personal (even if the narrators' standard mode is detachment). If I wrote a generic blurb for the back of this book, it would be "Funny and uniquely profound." Because funny sells books, but sometimes I think it sells short authors like Walsh. Yes, he made me laugh, but that's the least important of the many feelings Troublers evokes.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just my sort of book, really. I've said a lot of the anachronistic quality of this book, that it feels it sits outside of the time in which it was written and belongs with the likes of writers like Daniil Kharms and Andrei Platonov and Robert Walser (and definitely Franz Kafka, as well). So much strange and vivid imagery, tangled worlds with odd afflictions, such as an extremely fresh water supply becoming tainted with salt in "Brackish." "The Seven Seas" was particularly good, and by itself, worthy of reading. I can't say enough good things, because the stories I enjoyed in this collection I enjoyed so completely. It's all good, but man, some of it is plainly amazing.

[Tracy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Troublers is a collection of unsettling stories that ask the reader to suspend disbelief and follow swift transitions. I imagined it to be like Twin Peaks - I was similarly confused/engaged.

"The sea is true glamour. It swells and deflates and throws its curves into our ship, bouncing us gently, as if to remind us who's really the boss. It glistens with sunlight but keeps its own temperature, its own chilly climate, if for no other reason than to prove to the sun that it is better. It is not a bad way to die." - from the story, SEVEN SEAS

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot to like about this book--many of the stories have an imaginative sparkle that's hard to argue with; but the tone of the book, and its reliance on somewhat off-center/surreal leaps, gets monotonous.

[in8 · Rating 4 out of 5]

talked about it here: http://www.5cense.com/14/348.htm

[Shay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this but I have no idea how to describe it? Emotionally and mentally- grounded, realistic, biting. Situationally- absurd and unpredictable. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯