* Philip K. Dick Award finalist* Locus Recommended Reading Here are 33 weird, wonderful stories concerning men, women, teleportation, wind-up cats, and brown paper bags. By turns whimsical and unsettling—frequently managing to be both—these short fictions describe family relationships, bad breakups, and travel to outer space. Vukcevich's loopy, fun-house mirror take on everyday life belongs to the same absurdist school of work as that of George Saunders, David Sedaris, Ken Kalfus, and Victor Pelevin, although there is no one quite like him. Try one of these stories, it won't take you long, but it will turn your head inside out.
Contents: By the Time We Get to Uranus (1998) The Barber's Theme (1995) Beatnicks with Banjoes (2001) Finally Fruit (1997) Pretending (2001) Mom's Little Friends (1992) No Comet (1994) There Is Danger (1993) Pink Smoke (2001) Season Finale (1995) The Sweater (2001) Home Remedy (1996) A Breath-Holding Contest (1991) Fancy Pants (2000) In the Refrigerator (2001) The Perfect Gift (1994) Message in a Fish (2001) Catch (1996) The Finger (1995) Rejoice (1999) My Mustache (1993) We Kill a Bicycle (1995) A Holiday Junket (1998) Giant Step (1994) Quite Contrary (1994) Doing Time (1992) The Next Best Thing (1998) Beastly Heat (1999) Ceremony (1991) Poop (2000) White Guys in Space (1996) Whisper (2001) Meet Me in the Moon Room (1998)
Ray Vukcevich (born 1946) is an American writer of fantasy and literary fiction. His stories have been compared to the works of R. A. Lafferty, George Saunders, and David Sedaris. Some seventy-five stories, with titles such as "White Guys in Space", have appeared in science fiction and literary magazines. His online novelette "The Wages of Syntax" was a finalist for the 2004 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.
Vukcevich's novel The Man of Maybe Half a Dozen Faces was published by Minotaur Books in 2000. A collection of short stories — Meet Me in the Moon Room — was published in 2001 by Small Beer Press.
He spent many years as a research assistant in several university brain labs but is now writing full time. His latest book is a collection of short fiction called Boarding Instructions from Fairwood Press.
Not my favorite chocolate. There should be a 3.5 star rating for this description.
This book is like a box of chocolates. I eat one and think "that was good but not my favorite". Then I go and eat another one and think "I liked it but it wasn't the best one". On and on it goes in search of my favorite chocolate until I get to the end and realize "It's not in here!"
These stories may not be my favorite but they had enough going for them to keep me engaged to the end. The author writes in a very surreal style that defies any attempt to fit in reality. In fact, that is the point - the stories do not fit in reality as we know it. A couple of the stories were very memorable like Spacesuit and Catch.
Get the book. Put by the bedside. Read two stories each night before bed (they are very short stories). Your dreams will thank me later.
I usually quit reading books I can't stand while I'm ahead, but this is a short story collection and I kept hoping the next one would be better. And, well, it's not that long.
"Meet Me in the Moon Room" is excellently written, stylistically. In fact, whenever I read a book from Small Beer Press, I assume it's beautiful. The problem here being that it's not much else.
The stories follow a certain pattern: you get something impossible happening - something surreal. People react in one way or another. Not much else happens. For example, "By the Time We Get to Uranus" is about people turning into astronauts and floating into space - a guy's wife leaves that way, and then he turns into an astronaut and gets propulsion to maybe eventually reach her. That's it.
Taken individually, each short story is strange, surreal, unique. Put together, there's something that's missing.
There's another story in which there's a huge monster in a village. It grows bananas. It's a girl who the main character used to be friends with and who turned into a monster and then they all forgot about her. That's all.
I mean, it's not bad. It's definitely strange and interesting, but...
There's a story about a guy who makes his family wear paper bags on their heads to not see the approaching comet and then, by quantum stuff, it would disappear. There's a story in which a guy gets lost in a sweater which becomes a cave and his wife gets lost under the table, which becomes a world of its own. There's a story about a guy who comes home to find his wife wearing a bag over her head and he pus one on, too, and gets lost in it.
...but there's a bit too much repetition. Too many stories that have no solutions, the elements get repeated. There's body horror, people turning into things, cockroaches in nostrils, flesh falling, bodies being destroyed.
Individually, each story *works*. Together, they become a bit too much, too repetitive, too odd-for-odd's-sake.
I returned my library copy when I ordered my own from the publisher; I just had to have it. I only give it five stars, because I can't give it six.
Folks might get scared off by the collection's description of being "surreal," but it's still very accessible--the cover illustration is definitely appropos. There were two stories that might have been a little on the too-surreal side, but the "The Finger" more than made up for them both. The best story of them all, "White Guys in Space" is absolutely brilliant as a multi-layered cultural commentary that's thinly disguised as a piece of mysogynistic 50s sci-fi pulp shlock.
I was drawn to it because of the brevity of the stories, but I noticed that these were different from the tightly-written-to-the-point-of-breaking microfiction/flash fiction stories I've been reading lately. These were short, short stories that really were precisely as long as they needed to be.
A pastiche of naïve allegory in 33 stories where the treatment of self and interaction with others is shown through the optic of folklore (in one story Baba Yaga walks away with her house on chicken leg stilts), draws heavily on1950s sci fi a la R Bradbury and various fabulist intercessions. Individual characters throughout the stories give a sense of being the same aspect of a single narrating consciousness despite the changing phantasmagorical landscapes. Others have said the stories are less an experiment of style and more a cornucopia of imaginative ideas: and this works most of the time. Nano people living inside us, trees sprouting from the top of our heads, a haircut which reveals a city nestled underneath and attached to the scalp: why not? Let the farrago of surprises go on!
I picture Ray Vukcevich with electro-shock hair and wide, dry-red eyes. His stories are zany, jagged-edged, goopy fever-trip experiments that may remind you of the person you know who drinks too much coffee.
"Meet Me in the Moon Room" is weird. If I could go back in time, I might force myself to read only one to two of the stories at a time, rather than gobble them up on my 45-min train rides to and from work. They're sugary and sour - think Pop Rocks - and too much at one time doesn't really work.
As someone who has trouble with imagery, it's nice to be reminded what happens when you don't have it. Vukcevich's stories remind me of my own first drafts, in which ideas mush into one another without any sort of sensory grounding for the poor reader. Occasionally you'll get a nice piece of detail in the collection, like with the nose roaches (yes) in "Home Remedy," but on the whole the stories are brief dream snapshots. Sometimes that withholding style works, like in the atmospheric creeper "Pretending," but often it just leads to forgettable half-stories that are unsuccessful in burrowing into your memory. Most of the stories feel like they were written at 2 a.m., and I think they could have benefited from a couple morning revision sessions.
But hey, check it out if you're interested in the ultimate escapism. Vukevich surely knows how to keep your attention from story to story, even if he is only offering empty calories. Betcha can't read just one!
When I had commenced this modest-sized book of 253 pages, which contained 33 stories apparently laced with absurdist humour and surrealism, I had expected to meet a bunch of crisp & fresh ideas presented in the form of human beings and cats, the latter being the most powerful species on earth, if viral videos are any indicator. I was so right. I was soooooooooooo wrong! While a few stories are classics on their own, and would continue to haunt me with the feelings of loss (FINALLY FRUIT), love (MEET ME IN THE MOON ROOM), and fear (PRETENDING) they had succeeded in invoking, the rest were mostly pointless stuff hashed together with an effort that had been perhaps intended to be clever, but went nowhere. Still, lots of knowledgeable people have rated this book highly, and they must have found something profound or clever or both herein. You are welcome to follow their path. I’m out. But I’m taking PRETENDING with me. What a story that one was!!!!
Surrealist stories. Loved them. Surprised by how much I loved them. I started the book, and somehow, just a few days later, I had finished it. What I loved was how, over and over, I found myself thinking, "How and why would he ever think to write this? (And write just this portion of this story? And write it in this way?)"
Reading this collection was a delightful experience.
Strange, but interesting and lovely. Didn't like all the story the same, but some were absolutely amazing. Also, all of them made me think and re-think because of the strangeness, which is a good thing.
Ray writes in an alphabet that doesn't simply—boringly—move from a to z. It doubles back and spins around like a moebius strip, and it includes numbers, symbols, and the occasional clicking sound.
His stories are surreal, but they also have a hard kernel of human emotion—a little sadness, a little hope—that makes them universal, beautiful. Perfect.
Two brilliant stories in this collection: "Pretending" and "Whisper." A large amount of the stories are intriguing and hilarious (see "White Guys in Space" and "By the Time We Get to Uranus" and "We Kill a Bicycle.")
People spontaneously and uncontrollably fly through the galaxy. Siblings try to shake the nanobots out of their mum's body because they (the bots) are making her (the mum) too boring. A man is literally melting when his girlfriend gets too sexy around him, and another crosses the universe and gets a second head symbiote to meet a lady. A dad tries to stop the apocalypse by not looking at the asteroid hurtling down towards Earth (because uncertainty principle, but macro). Vukcevich's fever dreams - I mean, what else would these be? - are a lot more interesting than mine, which usually are variations on the "it's the apocalypse but somehow I still have to go to work or I'm back in high school" theme. This book also has the sad honor of being the last I ever read on my long-suffering, almost a decade old Kindle. I then tumbled down the stairs with her in hand and the screen is unsalvageable. She will be missed.
I happened to discover this book by chance here on Goodreads and then, sometime later, I found it on the cheap also by accident. They were very happy accidents, because reading Meet Me in the Moon Room gave me the warmest, coziest feeling in my heart: I had found Ray Bradbury's sucessor. It is the same spirit of reality mixed with science fiction mixed with fantasy mixed with the mundane mixed with whimsy that had made Bradbury so dear to me and that I had never found elsewhere. And it's not just the feeling, the stories are good. The kind that stay in your memory for a long time after you've finished reading.
Vukcevich's experimentation is not an experimentation with form. He has pretty narrative-driven stories and very little postmodern self-consciousness. But the content of the stories--the characters and events--are really, really weird. His brand of surrealism is sometimes allegory, sometimes philosophical lit, sometimes fabulist, but mostly about human relationships.
These stories are exactly my taste and style. I love suspending beliefs and accepting unusual normalcies. I was expecting to LOVE every story of this collection, but I ended up liking most, being unmoved by others, and loving just a couple.
I read this over a long expanse of time because half way through, I wasn’t enjoying it and I stepped away. But I came back and finished it happily!
I will need to reread it to remember my favorites from the first half, but from the second half, I loved “The Next Best Thing”- which made me laugh out loud while my seventh graders were testing and I had to apologize and hold it in. I also really loved the title story, which is the last in the collection.
The dark humor throughout Vukcevich’s writing is sharp and funny. His comments on societal norms through levels of parody are funny. And the way his stories occasionally left me feeling existential, left me sitting in silent contemplation between reads.
If you’re a fan of magical realism, dark humor, and some sharp wit- I would definitely give this collection a try!
None of these stories were particularly 'bad' but almost all of them felt entirely unfinished. (Even the long-form ones.) The author had a good idea, you want to see where he goes with it, aaaand: the story stops. Or it stops before the idea even seems to get built all they way. Often it seems like characters get written into corners and left there.
These stories felt like the collected unfinished writings of a deceased author- where their other existing works would help explain these or build them up in a way that doesn't happen when they are on their own.
I wanted to hear where the stories would go, the endings were unsatisfying and abrupt. But super creative, while they lasted.
1. 3 stars - good, sweet love story. Could have flowed better 2. 2 stars - made literally no sense. Descriptive little day dream but meaningless 3. 3 stars - ok? 4. 4 stars - sad about how he treated the girl but I like the witch reference and reminds me of. Fairy tale from childhood 5. 3 stars - haunting; could have used more detail and more meat to the story, with a tad more direction but it was good 6. 4 stars - twilight zone ish. Really a good concept of the world inside of her.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
This book feels less like a collection of short stories and more like an exquisite dream journal. There are so many weird twists and turns in the text that it really only makes sense if you give in to the surreal dream-like logic and don't question anything the author throws at you (even if it's a limp cat). As with any proper dream, the real life problems, insecurities and fears poke through at every step, but oh my, will you have tremendous fun on the way.
1.5 stars. Pulpy, repetitive, dully misogynistic, and written in a style I can only call 'undergraduate philosophy major attempts pastiche,' Meet Me in the Moon Room contains two good stories (the eponymous one and 'Finally Fruit') and two entertaining ones ('White Guys in Space' and 'We Kill a Bicycle'; and no, good is not the same as entertaining), and nothing much else to recommend it. One of those rare books I would genuinely call a waste of both my time and my money.
Intriguing and at times chilling. But mostly not to my taste. Bits I really liked: The cover and the more sweet/lovey "By the Time We Get to Uranus" and "Meet Me in the Moon Room" that bookend the collection -- I know that makes me a light weight :)
I have some tolerance for surrealism, and I did enjoy some of these stories. However, others went over the line and just became too hard to follow, at which point I lost interest. There are a couple that will stay with me, but the rest were just there.
This is a wide ranging collection of short stories that all contain some form of fantastical element. Some lean towards science-fiction, some more light fantasy, while others are more in the horror genre. While some of the stories are more accessible, like "By the Time We Get to Uranus" about a disease that causes people to grow spacesuits and float away and how it affects a couple contracting it at different times, others are more difficult to read, such as the story about the man obsessed with bugs infesting him. Among my favorites was "Mom's Little Friends" where two adult children deal with the effects of nanobots on their once adventurous mother, and "We Kill a Bicycle" about man-machine combinations and the lure of speed. Other stories are a bit more out there such as "Poop" where unusual things are found in a baby's diaper, or "My Mustache" where a man glues a garter snake under his nose, or "The Sweater" where putting on a handmade sweater takes a man on an weird journey. Some of the stories are quite poignant, including "The Perfect Gift" which takes the saying "if you can teach a man to fish" in quite a different direction when Santa Claus brings two starving street orphans presents. As with all short story collections, it is difficult to like all of the stories, but unfortunately I found less rather than more of these to my taste.
I enjoyed these stories, but not as much as I hoped I would. With surreal literature it's a little difficult to describe exactly what was off, but it may have something to do with the fact that the author reused the same names throughout the collection, which eventually became distracting. There were also a lot of abrupt shifts in language and story, making things difficult to follow and understand at times, although sometimes this really worked. The first story in the collection was a work of art, but I felt that the lack of cohesive narrative and the repetition made the rest of the book fall short of its opening. If partial stars were available, I would give this one 3.5.
thus far, i've read the first short story and i'm so amazingly impressed. this was loaned to me by a co-worker and i'm really happy to be exposed to it! updates forthcoming.
done. this was a great read. i'm intrigued by ray's ability to convey so many tangled emotions/states of being into small stories. surreal, serious, absurd, funny, loathsome, endearing, obtuse, insane, intelligent. if you've ever been interested in surrealist or dada art, this is the science fiction/literary equivalent. highly recommended!
I really enjoyed this collection of short stories from this author I'd never heard of before. They're not really sci-fi, sort of fantasy, but not with elves and dwarves and faeries. It's more like absurdist realism or something. Just read it! Most of the stories are just a few pages long, and I admit it, I read in the bathroom a lot, and this book was perfect for that. The stories made me laugh, and also made me think. My perfect combination.
To paraphrase another reviewer: "WTF did I just read....." It is true. Normally, I would not mind this reaction, but this time I did; simply because I had felt I had wasted precious hours on gibberish. I apologize for being so critical, but I could not relate to any of the characters, delve into any of the plots and found myself abandoning the stories three-quarter of the way through. It was not my type of weird or obscure.
Quirky and spectacular and surreal. Each short story is freshly unexpected and turns in directions you hadn't anticipated - while still being extremely matter-of-fact and accessible. I love this book.
(And simultaneously, I love pretty much anything that comes out from Small Beer Press - they have never steered me wrong! And this was the book that began the love affair).
I liked this a lot. The publisher, Small Beer Press, was having a before-Christmas sale and this one looked interesting, even though I don’t read a lot of “fantastic literature” or whatever the genre of this is. Some stories were too strange for me (which is my way of saying that I didn’t understand them), but the one's I did get were incredible.
This is one of those collection of stories that I wish the author had added a note before or after each one saying a little bit about it because quite a few were so surreal that I think a little something extra about them would have helped me enjoy them a bit more. That's just me though and there are probably those who wouldn't want explanations...