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Dear Dead Person
Like some bastard progeny of Nathaniel West, Benjamin Weissman's stories are savage, graceful, hilarious, and spooky with insights into the myriad quirks that dog nonconformists of every tripe. In Dear Dead Person, a cross-section of archetypes—teen sex-addicts, would-be rock stars, religious fanatics, serial murderers, and families who make the Menendezes look like Ozzie and Harriet—go about their twisted business in a prose that's both minimal and anarchic, as American as Raymond Carver, but riven by poetic ruptures that feel like transmissions from the screwed-up part of our collective psyche.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
3 people are currently reading
336 people want to read
About the author
Benjamin Weissman
28 books14 followersBenjamin Weissman is the author of two books of short fiction, Headless (2004) and Dear Dead Person (1994). His writing has appeared in Artforum, The Believer, Los Angeles Times, and McSweeney's. His collaboration with Yutaka Sone, What Every Snowflake Knows in Its Heart, was shown at Santa Monica Museum of Art. He teaches at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
Born: 1957, Los Angeles, California, United States
Born: 1957, Los Angeles, California, United States
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
June 14, 2021
When one reads Benjamin Weissman, you enter a funhouse where the exits are blocked off. So you have to go for the full ride, even though it's scary in parts, it is also hysterical. And strange enough he had a major influence on my own writing in that his work encouraged me to write short stories. That and Kafka's short stories. And my writings are nothing like those two, but it gave me encouragement to go for broke or to go for it. I think he's incredibly underrated, and one of these days there will be a Library of America edition of his complete works. Mark my words!
April 30, 2009
Whack, whack, whack. Fuck me sideways, get me out of here.
Read some of this on my commute out to friends to watch Man U v Arsenal in a pub last night. Took it mainly because it fit my jacket pocket, unlike the book I am also reading, Uwem Akpan's 'Say You're One of Them', which to tell the truth is so harrowing, brilliant, it's taking a toll on me.
It's a long commute, by two buses, cuz he's decided to live on the edge of nowhere (stourbridge) so got through about half. I don't want to read any more, it's so sick and suck and fucked up and funny as hell. To make matters worse or better I was pissed on the way back on the late bus(es), with my fellow pissheads around me having fun, which seemed to make the stories even more slobbering and bloody. I don't know, somehow brilliant and sick, I got nauseous I was glad to get off the bus and stop reading the fucking thing.
Read some of this on my commute out to friends to watch Man U v Arsenal in a pub last night. Took it mainly because it fit my jacket pocket, unlike the book I am also reading, Uwem Akpan's 'Say You're One of Them', which to tell the truth is so harrowing, brilliant, it's taking a toll on me.
It's a long commute, by two buses, cuz he's decided to live on the edge of nowhere (stourbridge) so got through about half. I don't want to read any more, it's so sick and suck and fucked up and funny as hell. To make matters worse or better I was pissed on the way back on the late bus(es), with my fellow pissheads around me having fun, which seemed to make the stories even more slobbering and bloody. I don't know, somehow brilliant and sick, I got nauseous I was glad to get off the bus and stop reading the fucking thing.
June 23, 2008
Even if you, 17, read this with the needle or knife in your arm you won't have suffered enough-
Weissman paints the antiglamour of post teenage life with ink seemingly ground from the collective internal organs of all who betted and hoped we wouldn't last this long.
The stories here represent easily some of the most grotesque themes I have ever endorsed. The crass assemblages are excrutiating in their filth and nihilism.
But you will read them wholly because within them you are finally the hero of something,
however maniacal, pathetic and uncool.
There are strips and streams of words woven in to these stories that may have been preformed giving the need to create a story to hide them in or to play them down. Or maybe those are just the kinds of image thoughts that fall naturally out of Weissman's mind while telling a story. In either case it proved nothing less than that he is a truly great writer - but should that title belittle him I would gladly call him anything else
-hopefully something of his own elysian design.
Weissman paints the antiglamour of post teenage life with ink seemingly ground from the collective internal organs of all who betted and hoped we wouldn't last this long.
The stories here represent easily some of the most grotesque themes I have ever endorsed. The crass assemblages are excrutiating in their filth and nihilism.
But you will read them wholly because within them you are finally the hero of something,
however maniacal, pathetic and uncool.
There are strips and streams of words woven in to these stories that may have been preformed giving the need to create a story to hide them in or to play them down. Or maybe those are just the kinds of image thoughts that fall naturally out of Weissman's mind while telling a story. In either case it proved nothing less than that he is a truly great writer - but should that title belittle him I would gladly call him anything else
-hopefully something of his own elysian design.
February 6, 2010
Irreverent fun! If you like dark humor and adolescent male angst (or at least reading about it, as it can be very amusing)you may enjoy this book. More sinister than Sedaris, but possibly appealing to some of his fan base. Grim hilarity!
January 28, 2008
Very funny irreverent stories. The title story is hilarious: a letter written in response to a comment by Ann Landers. I'll say no more so that you can enjoy the read.
August 22, 2017
Meh.
The first stories ( mind you, I picked up the book and started reading it without giving a glance at the back cover ) were pretty fun and remenescent of a B slasher-movie.
Figuring these were all short stories with apparently no coherent plot ties, the author could've used a better mix of vocabulary and phrasing -- it all felt written from the same deranged child's point of view....
It got worse.
Soggy and anticlimatic.
I'd describe this one as ' gory dad jokes bedtime stories ', and it doesn't become funny because it tries too much to be entertaining.
Voilà. Going back to the thrift store.
The first stories ( mind you, I picked up the book and started reading it without giving a glance at the back cover ) were pretty fun and remenescent of a B slasher-movie.
Figuring these were all short stories with apparently no coherent plot ties, the author could've used a better mix of vocabulary and phrasing -- it all felt written from the same deranged child's point of view....
It got worse.
Soggy and anticlimatic.
I'd describe this one as ' gory dad jokes bedtime stories ', and it doesn't become funny because it tries too much to be entertaining.
Voilà. Going back to the thrift store.
June 7, 2019
Unnecessarily gory and graphic. A handful of the stories are interesting but overall this just comes off as an odd obsession with violence, sexual abuse, and extreme parenting issues. After about 100 pages I felt myself ending each story disgusted and asking myself "again, really?"
January 5, 2025
“My son thinks just because his mother is dead that we should bury her, before we’ve tried everything”
June 19, 2015
I picked this book up on a whim. It was in a bargain bin, it’s reviews promised violence-coated hilarity, and if I didn’t like it, it was short.
Not short enough.
Don’t let the first story (which is quite a good second person narrative, depicting a depressive and solitary man who loses the only thing that makes him happy: a daily cookie) fool you, as the contents of this collection are pure pretentious garbage. The stories revolve around sexual frustration, rape, incest, blood, and guts. If there’s a deep message behind these them, it’s lost on me. Perhaps Weismann is trying to tell his readers that the only way to cope with the horrors of life is through nihilism? Doubtful. I get the sense that he really just wanted to write about sex and violence (and feces…lots of feces) and forgot to add anything redeeming. Even if the message was that the stories aren’t redeeming because life isn’t redeeming, I could buy into it. However, the so-called depth that a lot of reviewers seem to be talking about just isn’t there.
The writing is very shoddy. Weismann uses ridiculous devices in order to get away with essentially the same voice across all of these narratives. In “Museum Boy,” the child narrator justifies his high-level vocabulary by telling us that “I speak…[my parents’] language, their weird words fall into my head and land in the middle of my stomach.” This is why he can waver between talking childishly (“I smell…[coffee and whiskey]; I know it’s worse than piss or poop, which actually smell good to me.”) and using higher level-vocabulary (“When I watch my parents kiss and fuck I wonder why they don’t fart and cry, with their butts in the air, groaning like perturbed goats.”)
NOTE: The higher-level vocabulary in the previous example refers to the word “perturbed” not “fuck,” but I’ve included the whole sentence to help you get an idea of the writing, which only gets worse the deeper into the book you delve.
When I arrived at the story “Flesh for Hacking,” which (SPOILER ALERT!) concerns a man having sex with a severed head, I knew the rest of the book would be an author trying to shock for the sake of shock, while trying to present these stories as strangely poetic. I didn’t buy it for a second. These stories, with the exception of one or two that are not worth the time and effort in finding, are nothing more than the literary equivalent of a balls-out slasher movie.
Then again, maybe I’m missing something.
Not short enough.
Don’t let the first story (which is quite a good second person narrative, depicting a depressive and solitary man who loses the only thing that makes him happy: a daily cookie) fool you, as the contents of this collection are pure pretentious garbage. The stories revolve around sexual frustration, rape, incest, blood, and guts. If there’s a deep message behind these them, it’s lost on me. Perhaps Weismann is trying to tell his readers that the only way to cope with the horrors of life is through nihilism? Doubtful. I get the sense that he really just wanted to write about sex and violence (and feces…lots of feces) and forgot to add anything redeeming. Even if the message was that the stories aren’t redeeming because life isn’t redeeming, I could buy into it. However, the so-called depth that a lot of reviewers seem to be talking about just isn’t there.
The writing is very shoddy. Weismann uses ridiculous devices in order to get away with essentially the same voice across all of these narratives. In “Museum Boy,” the child narrator justifies his high-level vocabulary by telling us that “I speak…[my parents’] language, their weird words fall into my head and land in the middle of my stomach.” This is why he can waver between talking childishly (“I smell…[coffee and whiskey]; I know it’s worse than piss or poop, which actually smell good to me.”) and using higher level-vocabulary (“When I watch my parents kiss and fuck I wonder why they don’t fart and cry, with their butts in the air, groaning like perturbed goats.”)
NOTE: The higher-level vocabulary in the previous example refers to the word “perturbed” not “fuck,” but I’ve included the whole sentence to help you get an idea of the writing, which only gets worse the deeper into the book you delve.
When I arrived at the story “Flesh for Hacking,” which (SPOILER ALERT!) concerns a man having sex with a severed head, I knew the rest of the book would be an author trying to shock for the sake of shock, while trying to present these stories as strangely poetic. I didn’t buy it for a second. These stories, with the exception of one or two that are not worth the time and effort in finding, are nothing more than the literary equivalent of a balls-out slasher movie.
Then again, maybe I’m missing something.
February 17, 2023
I've given this collection three stars while giving the author's other collection 'Headless' four stars (in publication terms this collection was the author's first). There is no really good reason for giving one collection three and the other four - perhaps it is because I have read the collections one after another without any great lapse of time and I felt my enjoyment didn't hold through two anthologies. This makes me wonder, neither collection is very long, so perhaps there isn't much staying power in these stories.
The book has garnered extensive and extravagant praise in the media:
'...postliterate - but never boorishly post-modern...(these)...stories are like nothing else in contemporary fiction...'
and:
'Weissman gathers all that is ugly, vulgar, obscene, scary, disgusting, sick, tragic and sad to create a ...collection...(that is)...refreshing, nauseating, hilarious...'
Which all well and good but it was said about a lot of writers back in 1990s and of course you can't help feeling that far to many young authors at this point in time were trying to the next Dennis Cooper. What they didn't realise was that there was (certainly to begin with) a substantial creative vision underlying Coop ofer's work. The early story collections and novels were so much more then simply a collection of violent, obscene, shocking and nauseating vignettes of suburban despair and enui. There was a sharpness of observation and a critique of society beneath all that 'shocking and gritesque' pyrotechnics and it to great talent and craft to carry it off. Even Dennis Cooper could not live up to the standard of his early work and it is not surprising so many others, Weissman included, have failed to create anything really substantial.
I am sure Mr. Weissman will give a lot of pleasure, he is an interesting writer but one on a second outing that left very disappointed.
The book has garnered extensive and extravagant praise in the media:
'...postliterate - but never boorishly post-modern...(these)...stories are like nothing else in contemporary fiction...'
and:
'Weissman gathers all that is ugly, vulgar, obscene, scary, disgusting, sick, tragic and sad to create a ...collection...(that is)...refreshing, nauseating, hilarious...'
Which all well and good but it was said about a lot of writers back in 1990s and of course you can't help feeling that far to many young authors at this point in time were trying to the next Dennis Cooper. What they didn't realise was that there was (certainly to begin with) a substantial creative vision underlying Coop ofer's work. The early story collections and novels were so much more then simply a collection of violent, obscene, shocking and nauseating vignettes of suburban despair and enui. There was a sharpness of observation and a critique of society beneath all that 'shocking and gritesque' pyrotechnics and it to great talent and craft to carry it off. Even Dennis Cooper could not live up to the standard of his early work and it is not surprising so many others, Weissman included, have failed to create anything really substantial.
I am sure Mr. Weissman will give a lot of pleasure, he is an interesting writer but one on a second outing that left very disappointed.
May 7, 2019
an anthology of short stories clearly written for if not by patrick bateman himself. the collection seems to echo all of the thoughts that manifest in the period between waking consciousness and dreamy sleep - the drowsy half-sleep that encourages our most perverse, surreal, aimless, and visceral thoughts that upon face value flaunt absurdism, but upon closer scrutiny shows profound insights to the underbelly of life celebrated only by the avant-garde and edgy.
in other words, weissman, like his fellow short-story peers, tells his audience such commonly whispered truths, albeit in the gory, shocking, and admittedly poetic ramblings of a madman.
in other words, weissman, like his fellow short-story peers, tells his audience such commonly whispered truths, albeit in the gory, shocking, and admittedly poetic ramblings of a madman.
December 16, 2008
It's not the pervasive brutality in of itself that is so disgusting about the book, but how ineffectively Weissman tries to push off bad prose and bad plots as being experimental on the virtue of violence and anti-social behavior alone. In all its violent and scatological glory, "Dear Dead Person and Other Stories" is a putrid mastrubatory work by someone who writes like an angsty teen.
November 19, 2009
Definitely not for the squeamish, these stories were highly disturbing.
October 28, 2011
The first story in the book was my favourite, then, there were several that were just "Meh", but there were a few more of them that were decent, which is why I'm rating it a 3.
June 7, 2013
Violent. Obscene. Disgusting. Not sure what sort of person would read this. Still gave it 4 stars because for what it was, it was pretty good.
March 28, 2016
This book is like a car crash. You keep looking, but it is bad. Just like this book bad
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews