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Exit Zero
Twelve delightfully strange, haunting stories from the acclaimed, oracular author of Beautyland.
Death-shaped entities—with all of their humor and strangeness— haunt the twelve stories in Exit Zero. Vampires, ghost girls, fathers, blank spaces, day-old peaches, and famous paintings all pierce through their world into ours, reminding us to pay attention! and look alive! and offering many other flashes of wisdom from the oracle and author of Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino.
Death-shaped entities—with all of their humor and strangeness— haunt the twelve stories in Exit Zero. Vampires, ghost girls, fathers, blank spaces, day-old peaches, and famous paintings all pierce through their world into ours, reminding us to pay attention! and look alive! and offering many other flashes of wisdom from the oracle and author of Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino.
208 pages, Paperback
First published April 22, 2025
159 people are currently reading
8165 people want to read
About the author
Marie-Helene Bertino
12 books1,022 followersMarie-Helene Bertino was born and raised in Philadelphia. She is the author of the novels Beautyland (Best Books of 2024 (So Far) NYTimes, TIME Magazine, Esquire, Elle)), Parakeet (NYTimes Editor's Choice) and 2 a.m. at The Cat's Pajamas, and the short story collection Safe as Houses. Awards include The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Mississippi Review Prize, The Center for Fiction NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship and The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Electric Literature, Granta, Guernica, BOMB, among many others. She is the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, The Center For Fiction NYC, and Sewanee Writers Conference, where she was the Walter E. Dakin fellow. In June 2021, "Disrupting Realism," an online master class and panel she designed to make graduate level resources available at no charge, was attended by 1,300 people. She has taught in the Creative Writing programs of NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at Yale University. More info: www.mariehelenebertino.com
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 191 reviews
February 22, 2025
When I was 15, I joined a program at my school that let me attend a nearby community college instead of high school while receiving credit for both. I went from being surrounded by an endless parade of teenage cliques and venomous social circles that all seemed to ignore me in equal measure to a reality where I was surrounded by people of all ages and all backgrounds mingling as if it was just the most normal thing imaginable.
The first course that I signed up for was very plainly called “Creative Writing”, but even that stark description felt light years ahead of the types of English classes offered by my high school that felt like they doubled as prison sentences more than being an exploration of literature, writing or language. The instructor of my new class was a short man with cigarette-yellow stains on both his greying moustache and his fingertips, that favoured the plaid stylings of some decade before my own time. He carried the kind of small, open-ended leather case that made it easy to see a mess of papers overflowing in every direction and a stack of worn-out books with an endless amount of post-it note annotations jutting out from what looked like every single page.
The majority of my writing class was made up of adults that were coming back to school after more than a decade away from their own graduations, while the rest had just finished high school and were simply taking the next step before applying to a university or choosing a vocation. In other words, for pretty much everyone outside of myself, this was a blow-off class; a stepping stone that all of them would likely have preferred to leap over on their way to a diploma. They barely wanted to be there to begin with and after the first ten minutes of that opening class, you could sense that feeling deepen into something almost antagonistic, something tense and unforgiving.
Our instructor was a man of few words, but the words that he did speak, he chose carefully and dictated them with an emphasis that clashed with the surroundings of our campus. It gave him a sort of awkward cadence, much like that of a Rankin-Bass villain explaining their next plan to inflict evil upon some unknowing entity. His conviction to his position and his love of the written word was obvious in that way that lends to easy criticism from those that seek out the easy targets of the world. After years of suffering through English classes taught by disinterested baseball coaches that the school needed on their payroll, I was enthralled by each word that spilled from his mouth. He instructed us to read the first entry from what was to become our main textbook, that year’s edition of The Best American Short Stories. It was story that followed an unnamed protagonist as they are led on a comprehensive job orientation at an office where something discomforting is clearly lurking under the well-managed and clean facade being presented to the new employee.
That first short story didn’t divide the class, but instead it united them in open arms against our instructor. During the next session, the air in the room was rank with bitter complaints that the story didn’t make sense, that it didn’t go anywhere, that it was pointless, that it was creepy, that it was unsettling and so on. He weathered all of these criticisms with a blank look on his face and then announced that I was the only one in class that hadn’t said a word or offered my opinion on the story. To this day, I don’t remember what I said in that panicked, on-the-spot moment as I told the class why I felt like “Orientation” was beyond brilliant and like a wake-up call to my senses, but I will forever remember the smile that crept over his face as he simply replied to me, “Yes, you nailed it.”
In 2024, Marie-Helene Bertino released a novel titled Beautyland that promised the story of a girl growing up with the belief that she exists as an alien sending communications back to her home planet reporting on humanity and all of its eccentricities. It’s a concept that many authors would have tackled and either revelled in the hilarity of potentials for misunderstanding or wallowed in the disbelief that we as humans so willingly cause each other pain in so many unique ways. Beautyland chose a different path and its central character experienced the wealth of human experience and emotion in ways that left me shouting “YES!” to an empty room as I read or cowering in the corner of my bedroom as I desperately kept reading while hoping for a resolution that took away the sinking feeling in my stomach as I worried for, adored and felt proud of her experiencing this thing we call life. As I handed a copy of Beautyland to a family member this past Christmas, I said, “You love coming of age stories? Well, get ready for the ultimate one.”
Short stories are a notoriously difficult place to work in as a writer. You aren’t given the space to spread your proverbial legs and take your time to get to the point somewhere in the 491st page of your almost never-ceasing tome. The impact needs to be felt almost immediately and has to grip the reader for several pages before it drops you off a cliff and walks away without a single thought or regret for where you land. As I crept into the first pages of Marie-Helene Bertino’s new collection of short stories, Exit Zero, I was assaulted by “Marry The Sea”, a story told in short vignettes that all appear disparate and disjointed until the moment you grasp the fabric that connects them. It’s creepy, it’s unsettling, it’s Lynchian and it’s astonishing. It’s the first story from my community college creative writing course all over again and it’s glorious in it’s execution and it’s impact.
Bertino has a gift for writing almost like she is actually an alien, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Where most writers would look at a scene and approach it head on, she sneaks up on the sides and finds a way to describe things inside of a story that would normally feel unapproachable while also highlighting the multitude of smaller stories hidden inside of the larger one at play. For decades, people have marvelled at how much Hemmingway was able to say by not saying anything in his infamous six word short story, but Bertino deserves credit for the sheer amount of life and world-building that she is able to cram into just a few short pages. Not only could I visualize all of these characters and their surroundings, but I was left with an intense feeling of loss when my time with them had ended.
From the story of the septuagenarian divorcee that steals a painting of a famous singer in her first act of unmarried defiance to the story of the young woman stuck in a never-ending Groundhog Day style loop of one specific twenty-seven minute episode of Cheers (featuring the most chilling moment I’ve read in a book in years thanks to Frasier Crane and his priest from season two of Fleabag awareness of the fourth wall) to the tale of a woman making her way to her friend’s coffee shop as her ex-partners rain down from the sky and crash to the ground around her, Bertino’s stories relish in a surreal playfulness that straddles the line between what feels possible and what feels like something from a dream that you can’t seem to wake up from.
But no matter the level of humor or the often unavoidable feelings of anxiousness that each of the stories featured in Exit Zero conveys, Bertino is supremely adept at finding the heart of each of her characters and exploring the unanswered questions and the tears at the mental and emotional seams that plague each of them. In fact, it was one simple line at the end of one story (”When did you cut your hair?”) that left me completely unmoored and found me taking more than a day to recover from the way it pushed me off balance. I dare anyone to read the title story from this collection, a tale of a woman cleaning the house of her recently deceased father, and not come away a different sort of person than were before.
The joy and ache that one feels from being allowed the company of Bertino’s words might only be able to be described aptly enough by the author herself: “Is life very fragile or very resilient?” Writing that has the ability to produce this sort of profound effect in its readers deserves to be celebrated and I am certain that I will be championing the words that Marie-Helene Bertino arranges and expresses so beautifully for the rest of my own time as someone that has always felt out of time and out of step with this plane of existence.
Thank you to both NetGalley and FSG Originals for the chance to read and review an advanced copy of this extraordinary work.
The first course that I signed up for was very plainly called “Creative Writing”, but even that stark description felt light years ahead of the types of English classes offered by my high school that felt like they doubled as prison sentences more than being an exploration of literature, writing or language. The instructor of my new class was a short man with cigarette-yellow stains on both his greying moustache and his fingertips, that favoured the plaid stylings of some decade before my own time. He carried the kind of small, open-ended leather case that made it easy to see a mess of papers overflowing in every direction and a stack of worn-out books with an endless amount of post-it note annotations jutting out from what looked like every single page.
The majority of my writing class was made up of adults that were coming back to school after more than a decade away from their own graduations, while the rest had just finished high school and were simply taking the next step before applying to a university or choosing a vocation. In other words, for pretty much everyone outside of myself, this was a blow-off class; a stepping stone that all of them would likely have preferred to leap over on their way to a diploma. They barely wanted to be there to begin with and after the first ten minutes of that opening class, you could sense that feeling deepen into something almost antagonistic, something tense and unforgiving.
Our instructor was a man of few words, but the words that he did speak, he chose carefully and dictated them with an emphasis that clashed with the surroundings of our campus. It gave him a sort of awkward cadence, much like that of a Rankin-Bass villain explaining their next plan to inflict evil upon some unknowing entity. His conviction to his position and his love of the written word was obvious in that way that lends to easy criticism from those that seek out the easy targets of the world. After years of suffering through English classes taught by disinterested baseball coaches that the school needed on their payroll, I was enthralled by each word that spilled from his mouth. He instructed us to read the first entry from what was to become our main textbook, that year’s edition of The Best American Short Stories. It was story that followed an unnamed protagonist as they are led on a comprehensive job orientation at an office where something discomforting is clearly lurking under the well-managed and clean facade being presented to the new employee.
That first short story didn’t divide the class, but instead it united them in open arms against our instructor. During the next session, the air in the room was rank with bitter complaints that the story didn’t make sense, that it didn’t go anywhere, that it was pointless, that it was creepy, that it was unsettling and so on. He weathered all of these criticisms with a blank look on his face and then announced that I was the only one in class that hadn’t said a word or offered my opinion on the story. To this day, I don’t remember what I said in that panicked, on-the-spot moment as I told the class why I felt like “Orientation” was beyond brilliant and like a wake-up call to my senses, but I will forever remember the smile that crept over his face as he simply replied to me, “Yes, you nailed it.”
In 2024, Marie-Helene Bertino released a novel titled Beautyland that promised the story of a girl growing up with the belief that she exists as an alien sending communications back to her home planet reporting on humanity and all of its eccentricities. It’s a concept that many authors would have tackled and either revelled in the hilarity of potentials for misunderstanding or wallowed in the disbelief that we as humans so willingly cause each other pain in so many unique ways. Beautyland chose a different path and its central character experienced the wealth of human experience and emotion in ways that left me shouting “YES!” to an empty room as I read or cowering in the corner of my bedroom as I desperately kept reading while hoping for a resolution that took away the sinking feeling in my stomach as I worried for, adored and felt proud of her experiencing this thing we call life. As I handed a copy of Beautyland to a family member this past Christmas, I said, “You love coming of age stories? Well, get ready for the ultimate one.”
Short stories are a notoriously difficult place to work in as a writer. You aren’t given the space to spread your proverbial legs and take your time to get to the point somewhere in the 491st page of your almost never-ceasing tome. The impact needs to be felt almost immediately and has to grip the reader for several pages before it drops you off a cliff and walks away without a single thought or regret for where you land. As I crept into the first pages of Marie-Helene Bertino’s new collection of short stories, Exit Zero, I was assaulted by “Marry The Sea”, a story told in short vignettes that all appear disparate and disjointed until the moment you grasp the fabric that connects them. It’s creepy, it’s unsettling, it’s Lynchian and it’s astonishing. It’s the first story from my community college creative writing course all over again and it’s glorious in it’s execution and it’s impact.
Bertino has a gift for writing almost like she is actually an alien, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Where most writers would look at a scene and approach it head on, she sneaks up on the sides and finds a way to describe things inside of a story that would normally feel unapproachable while also highlighting the multitude of smaller stories hidden inside of the larger one at play. For decades, people have marvelled at how much Hemmingway was able to say by not saying anything in his infamous six word short story, but Bertino deserves credit for the sheer amount of life and world-building that she is able to cram into just a few short pages. Not only could I visualize all of these characters and their surroundings, but I was left with an intense feeling of loss when my time with them had ended.
From the story of the septuagenarian divorcee that steals a painting of a famous singer in her first act of unmarried defiance to the story of the young woman stuck in a never-ending Groundhog Day style loop of one specific twenty-seven minute episode of Cheers (featuring the most chilling moment I’ve read in a book in years thanks to Frasier Crane and his priest from season two of Fleabag awareness of the fourth wall) to the tale of a woman making her way to her friend’s coffee shop as her ex-partners rain down from the sky and crash to the ground around her, Bertino’s stories relish in a surreal playfulness that straddles the line between what feels possible and what feels like something from a dream that you can’t seem to wake up from.
But no matter the level of humor or the often unavoidable feelings of anxiousness that each of the stories featured in Exit Zero conveys, Bertino is supremely adept at finding the heart of each of her characters and exploring the unanswered questions and the tears at the mental and emotional seams that plague each of them. In fact, it was one simple line at the end of one story (”When did you cut your hair?”) that left me completely unmoored and found me taking more than a day to recover from the way it pushed me off balance. I dare anyone to read the title story from this collection, a tale of a woman cleaning the house of her recently deceased father, and not come away a different sort of person than were before.
The joy and ache that one feels from being allowed the company of Bertino’s words might only be able to be described aptly enough by the author herself: “Is life very fragile or very resilient?” Writing that has the ability to produce this sort of profound effect in its readers deserves to be celebrated and I am certain that I will be championing the words that Marie-Helene Bertino arranges and expresses so beautifully for the rest of my own time as someone that has always felt out of time and out of step with this plane of existence.
Thank you to both NetGalley and FSG Originals for the chance to read and review an advanced copy of this extraordinary work.
December 19, 2024
Bertino tackles heavy themes like grief, estrangement, divorce, and disconnection with the winning charm and dry wit that made her 2024 novel Beautyland such a standout. Her writing is both funny and emotionally resonant – brimming with life, verve, humor and heart.
The stories run the gamut of topics and it was amusing to see simple setups veer so wildly off course. In “Can Only Houses Be Haunted?,” a bickering couple finds that the peaches they bought from a roadside farm stand are haunted by a malign spirit. In “Exit Zero,” my favorite of the bunch, a daughter inherits a house from her estranged father – along with an unenthused, flatulent unicorn living in the backyard. Some stories, like “Edna in the Rain,” in which a woman’s ex-boyfriends literally rain from the sky, end abruptly or feel undercooked. But the majority are satisfying – both absurd and poignant in different ways.
★★★½
My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.
Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Bluesky
The stories run the gamut of topics and it was amusing to see simple setups veer so wildly off course. In “Can Only Houses Be Haunted?,” a bickering couple finds that the peaches they bought from a roadside farm stand are haunted by a malign spirit. In “Exit Zero,” my favorite of the bunch, a daughter inherits a house from her estranged father – along with an unenthused, flatulent unicorn living in the backyard. Some stories, like “Edna in the Rain,” in which a woman’s ex-boyfriends literally rain from the sky, end abruptly or feel undercooked. But the majority are satisfying – both absurd and poignant in different ways.
★★★½
My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.
Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Bluesky
April 13, 2025
I can’t say I really understood the point or plot of every story, but I did laugh and also feel uncomfortable which I’m pretty sure is the main purpose.
We have unicorns, art theft, Groundhog Day set in a sitcom….
This is the author of Beautyland, and if you are familiar with that, this is very similar just more fragmented and surreal. If you haven’t read her debut, please go do that.
Somehow, Bertino manages to inject nostalgia in all of her stories. Even though I am probably slightly too young to get the full impact, I still felt transported.
This is anxious, charming, weird, nonsensical.
The sudden start and stop of the stories with no handholding or explanations did put me off, however short stories are not my favourite most of the time in any case.
Audiobook arc gifted by Dreamscape Audio.
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We have unicorns, art theft, Groundhog Day set in a sitcom….
This is the author of Beautyland, and if you are familiar with that, this is very similar just more fragmented and surreal. If you haven’t read her debut, please go do that.
Somehow, Bertino manages to inject nostalgia in all of her stories. Even though I am probably slightly too young to get the full impact, I still felt transported.
This is anxious, charming, weird, nonsensical.
The sudden start and stop of the stories with no handholding or explanations did put me off, however short stories are not my favourite most of the time in any case.
Audiobook arc gifted by Dreamscape Audio.
Bookstagram
Tiktok
April 13, 2025
Major thanks to NetGalley and FSG for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:
*3.5 rounded up
A woman trapped in a rerun. A tiger on the loose. Boohoo ghosts. Unicorns.
Bertino’s writing reminds me of Amelie. The way scenes chop up and progress into unexpected unravelings. Childlike wonder. Deep thrills in the simple and wondrous. Veering on magical realism, the stories surprise with every world. And though they aren’t fully fleshed out and perhaps need a bit more writing to become larger somethings, Bertino’s prose and imagination is what creates a boldness I haven’t found in other writers. It’s distinct, takes time getting used to, but if you’ve ever run around the city with a bunch of errands on three cold brews, seeing in seconds and forgetting shapes and colors altogether, everything meshing into Gershwin symphony, then you understand the wonder that she writes from. And sometimes that’s enough.
*3.5 rounded up
A woman trapped in a rerun. A tiger on the loose. Boohoo ghosts. Unicorns.
Bertino’s writing reminds me of Amelie. The way scenes chop up and progress into unexpected unravelings. Childlike wonder. Deep thrills in the simple and wondrous. Veering on magical realism, the stories surprise with every world. And though they aren’t fully fleshed out and perhaps need a bit more writing to become larger somethings, Bertino’s prose and imagination is what creates a boldness I haven’t found in other writers. It’s distinct, takes time getting used to, but if you’ve ever run around the city with a bunch of errands on three cold brews, seeing in seconds and forgetting shapes and colors altogether, everything meshing into Gershwin symphony, then you understand the wonder that she writes from. And sometimes that’s enough.
May 22, 2025
How curious—I thought Bertino’s charmingly unconventional tales would land perfectly as short stories. Beautyland was one of my favorites from 2024—her quirky, childlike voice and the sci-fi and speculative fiction genres merge wonderfully. In Exit Zero, the author carries those elements over: the playful writing creates a light-hearted mood as she subtly engages with ideas like loss, separation, and belonging for humans. You can count on peacocks and tigers making the cast list with the story Exit Zero, featuring unicorns, as my top pick (without a doubt) from this collection. Ultimately, the stories felt hurried and required more cooking time. This could be because it takes readers slightly longer to adjust to the author’s unique style and pantomime; by the time I catch the rhythm of the fantastical stories, it seems the next tune starts. The nostalgic quality of Bertino’s writing makes me look forward to what she’ll publish next.
My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC.
My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC.
November 22, 2024
(a very weak 3.5/5⭐, rounded up)
Enjoyable, but not as strong as I hoped. It could just be a "me" thing, but some of these felt like too much had been crammed into too short of a story.
My favorites from this collection are:
Edna In The Rain (kinda reminded me of The Husband's by Holly Gramazio)
The Ecstacy of Sam Malone
Flowers & Their Meanings (flower "names" melted my heart and made me think of my late gma)
Viola In Midwinter
There are other short story collections I'd recommend before this one, like Out there by Kate Folk or Thanks For This Riot by Janelle Bassett.
{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Marie-Helene Bertino and FSG for the DRC in exchange for my honest review!}
Enjoyable, but not as strong as I hoped. It could just be a "me" thing, but some of these felt like too much had been crammed into too short of a story.
My favorites from this collection are:
Edna In The Rain (kinda reminded me of The Husband's by Holly Gramazio)
The Ecstacy of Sam Malone
Flowers & Their Meanings (flower "names" melted my heart and made me think of my late gma)
Viola In Midwinter
There are other short story collections I'd recommend before this one, like Out there by Kate Folk or Thanks For This Riot by Janelle Bassett.
{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Marie-Helene Bertino and FSG for the DRC in exchange for my honest review!}
September 15, 2025
2.5 rounded up. The stories here are all clever and very well-written but I just couldn’t discern any emotional depth. You have something really smart and intricately constructed and the themes will be: “men are jerks”, “women are afraid of aging”, “I don’t know how to relate to my mother”, and “cruelty to animals is bad”. I felt like I kept waiting for a revelation that never came.
Read
August 4, 2025print copy ordered for this year’s Independent Bookstore haul, but listened first as an audiobook! &, so good!!
May 5, 2025
Beautyland wasn't the best book I read last year but it was the one I was always talking about, the one I would suggest to people, the one I looked for reviews of and discussions about to see what other people thought of it. Exit Zero is a short story collection by the same author, Marie-Helene Bertino. It contains stories as weird and wonderful as Beautyland. I had the same reading experience with Exit Zero as I did with Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reaches series - never quite sure where I was or where I was going but I sure enjoyed the ride. These stories are fantastical and creepy and deeply human. Adenrele Ojo did an excellent job narrating these odd narratives, neither leaning too far into the campy elements nor going too far the other direction of detachment. Instead, the stories are read with a warmth which brings the humanity to the front, regardless of how bizarre the context. I hope there are more collaborations between the author and narrator in the future. For now, if Bertino writes it, I will read it! Thank you to the author, narrator, publisher, and NetGalley for the audioARC.
July 2, 2025
i found this to be so boring that i even left the last 30 mins of the audiobook for the next day, only to dread having to spend more time listening to it (i could have dnfed, but my toxic productivity could never allow me to for such a short book). if the stories weren't boring, the weirdness of some felt so forced that i couldn't enjoy much of it. out of all 13 stories, i liked 2 enough honestly. the audiobook narrator's voice triggered my escapism, and to me, it felt like it made the stories even more boring.
August 4, 2025
Loved this book. All the stories were ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ to me. If I wrote stories, I would like to write like Marie-Helene Bertino. So beautiful, insightful and smart..
July 19: Marry the sea ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Just read it twice in one day and it is growing on me. Fragmented, Lyrical, Emotional, full of loose associations and powerful images and metaphors (-here’s an example of a fragment- ….The boy's penis had been injured in war and replaced with two orchids that needed different kinds of sunlight. The girl doesn't want a sexual relationship. [...] How can she tell him I want you to chew over my shoulder and ask what I'm reading? No one believes you when you're honest. So she says, "I don't want a sexual relationship," and leaves the rest unsaid and he senses a withholding and assumes she's lying and she feels misunderstood and eventually they get into separate cars and part…)
Edna in Rain ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 20: Exit Zero ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 21: Can only houses be haunted? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 22: Lottie Woodside and the Diamond Dust Cher ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 25: The ecstasy of Sam Malone ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 26: The night gardener ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 27: Kathleen in bright colors ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Outstanding! This story is so good in its depiction of failed connection in a relationship. The ending seemed so sad to me. Sometimes two people, no matter how much they try, are just not for each other.
July 28: Every forest, every film ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 30: In the basement of Saint John the Divine ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This paragraph alone is a short story, isn’t it? Loved the poetic writing!
“It had been so long since they’d shared love’s telepathy, he saw her as if from the other side of a lake. They didn’t talk but signaled. Edward’s need for human contact became primal. He’d had sex a few times with a colleague. She’d let him come inside her. […] After a month, the thrill of her skin migrated to his stomach and turn to rot”
August 2: Flowers and their meaning ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
August 3: Viola in midwinter ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 19: Marry the sea ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Just read it twice in one day and it is growing on me. Fragmented, Lyrical, Emotional, full of loose associations and powerful images and metaphors (-here’s an example of a fragment- ….The boy's penis had been injured in war and replaced with two orchids that needed different kinds of sunlight. The girl doesn't want a sexual relationship. [...] How can she tell him I want you to chew over my shoulder and ask what I'm reading? No one believes you when you're honest. So she says, "I don't want a sexual relationship," and leaves the rest unsaid and he senses a withholding and assumes she's lying and she feels misunderstood and eventually they get into separate cars and part…)
Edna in Rain ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 20: Exit Zero ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 21: Can only houses be haunted? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 22: Lottie Woodside and the Diamond Dust Cher ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 25: The ecstasy of Sam Malone ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 26: The night gardener ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 27: Kathleen in bright colors ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Outstanding! This story is so good in its depiction of failed connection in a relationship. The ending seemed so sad to me. Sometimes two people, no matter how much they try, are just not for each other.
July 28: Every forest, every film ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
July 30: In the basement of Saint John the Divine ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This paragraph alone is a short story, isn’t it? Loved the poetic writing!
“It had been so long since they’d shared love’s telepathy, he saw her as if from the other side of a lake. They didn’t talk but signaled. Edward’s need for human contact became primal. He’d had sex a few times with a colleague. She’d let him come inside her. […] After a month, the thrill of her skin migrated to his stomach and turn to rot”
August 2: Flowers and their meaning ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
August 3: Viola in midwinter ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
September 16, 2025
Loved this short story collection! Each story was like a nesting doll, revealing layers of themes as you moved along. My personal favorites were the titular story, "The Ecstasy of Sam Malone", "The Night Gardener", and "Flowers and Their Meanings".
I highly recommend reading this book physically, as Bertino's work at the sentence level is magnificent and, I found, best appreciated when reading the words with your eyes.
I highly recommend reading this book physically, as Bertino's work at the sentence level is magnificent and, I found, best appreciated when reading the words with your eyes.
July 15, 2025
Twelve strange, exotic stories about everyday life. That sounds like an oxymoron, but not in Bertino's hands. She has a way of conflating the most ordinary of daily experiences with something bizarre, supernatural or just plain strange. She reminds me a little of Steven Millhauser.
Most of the stories are written in the present tense, which is an interesting choice. It gives an immediacy to the stories, as if you're seeing it 'as it happens'. It may add to the suspense in some of the stories, since the protagonist isn't retelling the story so they presumably don't know what will happen. Neither will you.
Mysterious balloons carrying cryptic messages, haunted peaches, a vampire, a narrator trapped in reruns of the TV show 'Cheers' (sounding a little like 'Groundhog Day') – these are some of the strange things that you'll see in a Bertino story. She can be very funny, too.
Most of the stories are written in the present tense, which is an interesting choice. It gives an immediacy to the stories, as if you're seeing it 'as it happens'. It may add to the suspense in some of the stories, since the protagonist isn't retelling the story so they presumably don't know what will happen. Neither will you.
Mysterious balloons carrying cryptic messages, haunted peaches, a vampire, a narrator trapped in reruns of the TV show 'Cheers' (sounding a little like 'Groundhog Day') – these are some of the strange things that you'll see in a Bertino story. She can be very funny, too.
October 4, 2025
holy cow wait this was soooo good. awesome collection of short stories, i found every single story so captivating, unique, strange, and incredibly well written. i definitely want to read more of her work because her writing style is fantastic
April 11, 2025
I wanted to like this one so bad... I loved Beautyland but this collection is just not for me.
Beautyland was an unexpected hit for me. Her childlike, whimsical speculative fiction/sci-fi tale had me hooked and I was so excited to see that she was coming out with a short story collection. I thought her previous work was such a great debut and I was excited to see her grow in her sophomore novel. I honestly didn't see much growth here. It felt more like a regression.
I didn't think any of the stories were very strong. There's so much packed into such a short story that it comes off as too fantastical and confusing at times--not to mention that they all end so abruptly that it leaves you scratching your head. None of premises were bad it just felt rushed and I think they needed some more time and editing in order to bring out their true potential.
As a side note I did listen to the audiobook and I would not recommend that format. The narrator adds very little life into the stories and is very monotone--like reading from the phone book monotone. It detracted from the experience so I might try this collection again with the physical book and see if I feel any differently.
*Thank you to Netgalley and Dreamscape Media for providing me an arc copy of this book. All opinions expressed are entirely my own*
Beautyland was an unexpected hit for me. Her childlike, whimsical speculative fiction/sci-fi tale had me hooked and I was so excited to see that she was coming out with a short story collection. I thought her previous work was such a great debut and I was excited to see her grow in her sophomore novel. I honestly didn't see much growth here. It felt more like a regression.
I didn't think any of the stories were very strong. There's so much packed into such a short story that it comes off as too fantastical and confusing at times--not to mention that they all end so abruptly that it leaves you scratching your head. None of premises were bad it just felt rushed and I think they needed some more time and editing in order to bring out their true potential.
As a side note I did listen to the audiobook and I would not recommend that format. The narrator adds very little life into the stories and is very monotone--like reading from the phone book monotone. It detracted from the experience so I might try this collection again with the physical book and see if I feel any differently.
*Thank you to Netgalley and Dreamscape Media for providing me an arc copy of this book. All opinions expressed are entirely my own*
June 26, 2025
Bertino is one of my all time favorite writers. I recommend 2am at the Cat’s Pajamas to pretty much everyone I meet. Sadly, this was my least favorite of her books. Her novels are packed with great moments of humanness, often also a bit of wackiness and always sentences you’ll write down to remember later. Most of the stories here felt lacking these very things, at least to me. I was often left wondering what I was meant to take away from the story, or was that the point? That there wasn’t a takeaway? The stories here feel a lot closer to her novel Parakeet than Beauty Land or Cat’s Pajamas, and it’s not all bad news, I think fans of her work will find enough to enjoy here to keep reading and momentarily tide them over for her next novel.
June 11, 2025
Do you ever wonder what it would be like to get stuck in a time loop of one of your favorite childhood tv shows? Wonder no more, the answer is here in one of the 12 short stories by the talented Marie-Helene Bertino.
After reading Beautyland earlier this year, I knew I appreciated the subtle way that her writing encompasses you. She has a distinct way of dropping wisdom and knowledge bombs in discreet places. They lie in wait like traps, and when you find them, you stop for a second, and it just makes you go "huh". Not "huh" as a question, but "huh" as a satisfactory exclamation that you just got what she was trying to make you get.
Exit Zero is a continuation of her subtle and sometimes quirky writing style. Honestly, the first story I didn't even understand until I finished it, but then I had one of those "huh" moments and was like, "yes, now I see". I listened to the audiobook, and really should have written down the names of each story so that I could reference them here, but honestly didn't think of it at the time. Note to self for future short story audiobooks.
There were many stories I enjoyed - "Exit Zero" is the titular story and is about a woman and a unicorn. There was a vampire story, a ghost girl and her peaches story. One about a boy that was born blind and then had an operation so he could see. Another about a woman, her sister, her garden and lots of balloons. These were some of the more memorable ones for me.
My favorite story by far, mostly due to the nostalgia factor, is the one that I mentioned in the opening of this review - a woman gets trapped in a time loop inside episodes of the 80s tv show "Cheers", which is set in a bar in Boston. I'll date myself a bit here by saying this was one of my favorite shows as a kid. (Yes, my parents passively permitted me to watch this, even though they complained at me that I watched it. They are faithful hypocritical and bigoted Christians who have never drank, smoked or done drugs. They offered no real structure, discipline or boundaries for me as a child, so here we are. Alas, I do not have a good relationship with them.) I found myself filled with happy nostalgia as the narrator rattled off the quirks and oddities of each beloved character. I found myself smiling ear to ear through this one and truly appreciated the interesting concept and execution of this story.
This set of stories further solidified my enjoyment of Bertino's writing style - she is subtle, yet witty and entertaining. I highly recommend this book to y'all out there that enjoy quiet stories that can pack a punch.
(Updated with full review on 6/11/25)
After reading Beautyland earlier this year, I knew I appreciated the subtle way that her writing encompasses you. She has a distinct way of dropping wisdom and knowledge bombs in discreet places. They lie in wait like traps, and when you find them, you stop for a second, and it just makes you go "huh". Not "huh" as a question, but "huh" as a satisfactory exclamation that you just got what she was trying to make you get.
Exit Zero is a continuation of her subtle and sometimes quirky writing style. Honestly, the first story I didn't even understand until I finished it, but then I had one of those "huh" moments and was like, "yes, now I see". I listened to the audiobook, and really should have written down the names of each story so that I could reference them here, but honestly didn't think of it at the time. Note to self for future short story audiobooks.
There were many stories I enjoyed - "Exit Zero" is the titular story and is about a woman and a unicorn. There was a vampire story, a ghost girl and her peaches story. One about a boy that was born blind and then had an operation so he could see. Another about a woman, her sister, her garden and lots of balloons. These were some of the more memorable ones for me.
My favorite story by far, mostly due to the nostalgia factor, is the one that I mentioned in the opening of this review - a woman gets trapped in a time loop inside episodes of the 80s tv show "Cheers", which is set in a bar in Boston. I'll date myself a bit here by saying this was one of my favorite shows as a kid. (Yes, my parents passively permitted me to watch this, even though they complained at me that I watched it. They are faithful hypocritical and bigoted Christians who have never drank, smoked or done drugs. They offered no real structure, discipline or boundaries for me as a child, so here we are. Alas, I do not have a good relationship with them.) I found myself filled with happy nostalgia as the narrator rattled off the quirks and oddities of each beloved character. I found myself smiling ear to ear through this one and truly appreciated the interesting concept and execution of this story.
This set of stories further solidified my enjoyment of Bertino's writing style - she is subtle, yet witty and entertaining. I highly recommend this book to y'all out there that enjoy quiet stories that can pack a punch.
(Updated with full review on 6/11/25)
November 13, 2025
God I love these sentences and paragraphs! I love her sensibility! It’s like reupping your glasses prescription, everything is very crisp and to the point, but deeply concerned with the surreal.
My favorites were “Exit Zero” “In the Basement of Saint John the Divine” and “Flowers and Their Meanings,” all concern parent-child relationships.
“She realizes her father’s death has canceled only his life. Their relationship, albeit one-sided, continues.”
My favorites were “Exit Zero” “In the Basement of Saint John the Divine” and “Flowers and Their Meanings,” all concern parent-child relationships.
“She realizes her father’s death has canceled only his life. Their relationship, albeit one-sided, continues.”
May 12, 2025
I have received this short story collection for free as eARC and I write this review voluntarily.
Exit Zero is a fun collection of weird stories. I liked the most but real gems were the last stories. There is no way to figure out endings of any of the stories and some even do not have an ending. Some feel like weird girl fiction and some are like Julian Barnes style. There is no way to fully describe this ingenious collection, but it worths the time and effort for readers of weird fiction and also cosy stories. If you are up to read something extraordinary, Exit Zero is a good selection.
Thanks a lot to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the author Marie-Helene Bertino for this chance to read this dreamy story collection.
Exit Zero is a fun collection of weird stories. I liked the most but real gems were the last stories. There is no way to figure out endings of any of the stories and some even do not have an ending. Some feel like weird girl fiction and some are like Julian Barnes style. There is no way to fully describe this ingenious collection, but it worths the time and effort for readers of weird fiction and also cosy stories. If you are up to read something extraordinary, Exit Zero is a good selection.
Thanks a lot to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the author Marie-Helene Bertino for this chance to read this dreamy story collection.
Want to read
June 3, 2025i only have 3 short story collections left on my bookshelf so this is very serious now. i need to read this even SOONER otherwise i might risk having NO short story collections on my shelf. what then?
October 7, 2025
I could have read a million more of these stories!!! Bertino has such a beautiful way of constructing worlds that feel foreign and familiar and some sentences stopped me dead in my tracks wow!!!
Maybe my favorites were “Can Only Houses Be Haunted?” and “Kathleen in Light Colors” but also “Viola in Midwinter” and “Lottie Woodside and the Diamond Dust Cher.” But also all of them!!
Maybe my favorites were “Can Only Houses Be Haunted?” and “Kathleen in Light Colors” but also “Viola in Midwinter” and “Lottie Woodside and the Diamond Dust Cher.” But also all of them!!
May 18, 2025
Was a little mixed on these stories, which are almost all about grief, divorce, and aging. In Marie-Helene Bertino's perfect novel Beautyland she makes life's mundanities seem magical, whereas this collection makes the magical mundane, often even bleak. I was intrigued by many of the unique concepts, and she can be such a genius writer, but the depressing tone put me in a bad mood and I didn't personally love that practically every story had an unsatisfying ending.
May 10, 2025
I loved Beautyland so much when it came out and I still think of it fondly — the tenderness and loneliness, the innate sense of yearning in being an oddity. All of these things are what I came into Exit Zero expecting, because above all, Marie-Helene Bertino's strangeness is undeniably endearing. But while Exit Zero mirrors Bertino's typical sci-fi / speculative fiction framing, it fails, for the most part, to exude the same wisdom in simplicity gleamed from Beautyland.
Most of the stories in this collection left me lost on its purpose (but that could also just be my own misunderstanding). I will say that it's like Bertino heard the advice of "come in late and get out early" when writing chapters and took it to the extreme with these short stories. Some of them had intriguing premises, which is to be expected from Bertino, but the execution of them shouldn't have been so restricted to flatness for the sake of brevity.
2.5 rounded up. Thank you to the publishers for the copy!
Most of the stories in this collection left me lost on its purpose (but that could also just be my own misunderstanding). I will say that it's like Bertino heard the advice of "come in late and get out early" when writing chapters and took it to the extreme with these short stories. Some of them had intriguing premises, which is to be expected from Bertino, but the execution of them shouldn't have been so restricted to flatness for the sake of brevity.
2.5 rounded up. Thank you to the publishers for the copy!
April 18, 2025
This is a fascinating collection of short stories ranging from the strange to the unpredictable. Bertino does a fine job at tackling heavy subjects (divorce, estrangement, not knowing what to do in life) with magical-realism elements (unicorns, vampires, ghosts). Not something that’s typically for me, but I enjoyed the variation. My favorite stories are ‘Lottie Woodside and the Diamond Dust Cher’ and ‘The Night Gardener.’
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for the ARC.
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for the ARC.
August 13, 2025
The pace of these short stories was a little off for me. I would have loved for them to be a little longer. I really enjoy Bertino’s writing, but it just takes me a lot of effort to get into a story so I felt a little taxed .
A lot of the stories had a small element of supernatural to them, but were heavily grounded as well. I really enjoyed that!
A lot of the stories had a small element of supernatural to them, but were heavily grounded as well. I really enjoyed that!
November 14, 2025
Marie-Helene Bertino really is such a great author. After “Beautyland” was one of my fav books last year, I couldn’t pass up these short stories. Were they a little convoluted at times? Yes! Were they also funny and weird? Also yes! Did I enjoy them? Yes!!
dnf
July 31, 2025I loved Beautyland last year but this short story collection was WAY more surreal and disjointed than I was ready for. Might try a different collection of hers
August 1, 2025
LOVE Marie-Helene Bertino. Favorites in this collection are The Ecstasy of Sam Malone, Exit Zero, The Night Gardener, Viola in Midwinter, and Every Forest, Every Film but they're all pretty great.
August 11, 2025
2.75 stars. There were some nice moments, but I feel like I skimmed the whole thing. Writing a sticky, compelling short story is really hard. Maybe it’s time to reread The Tenth of December.
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