One of
the more satisfying stories in this wide-ranging collection—Alan
DeNiro's first—is a wickedly funny look at professional infanticide.
"Child Assassin" ranks up there with Moby-Dick for
memorable first lines: "No one knew what to call him, which suited
him perfectly well, because he liked to kill babies, and it was better
not to have a name attached to such acts." A surprisingly rich plotline
ensues, speaking to the tragedy of letting our "darlings"—human
or metaphorical—go (or having them kill us instead). In a mere nine
pages, DeNiro moves us from an outlandish premise to a conclusion that
feels genuine. That's typical of the stories in this intriguing new collection,
which meld the far-fetched with the eerily familiar.
In its relatively short history, Small
Beer Press has earned accolades and a devoted indie following, specializing
in literary fiction that doesn't fit the realist mode, but defies easy
fantasy/sci-fi categorizations. With Skinny Dipping's arrival,
that streak is likely to continue. Like other Small Beer favorites (think
Carol Emshwiller, Kelly Link, and Karen Joy Fowler), DeNiro's fiction
tends toward the speculative, but even that doesn't quite describe it.
(After all, what fiction isn't speculative?) DeNiro is less interested
in what kinds of aliens we might be fighting a couple hundred years from
now than he is in how alien our lives have already become, and how blithely
we've adapted. Indeed, as far as the future is concerned, most of his
stories don't mention it. The time might be 2006 or 2206, for all we know.
And even if we fail to recognize these wayward realities as belonging
to our own time, that doesn't mean they don't match somebody's idea of
it.
Whenever and wherever they find themselves
(often in some remote corner of Pennsylvania), DeNiro's characters are
invariably misfits, loners, refugees. In Skinny Dipping, difference—and
the alienation that accompanies it—is an unrelenting and at times
oppressive presence. In "Our Byzantium," a nameless narrator
tries to overcome his memories of a failed relationship while his small
college town is invaded by the medieval Byzantine army. And in the collection's
title story, a teenager wrestles with the passions and perversions of
religion and politics when he falls for a girl from a second-class caste
of human-dolphin hybrids.
Of course, there are a few less satisfying
stories here too, particularly for the reader who enjoys the clear vision
and total control of such stories as "The Exchanges," "A
Keeper," and "Salting the Map." Overall, DeNiro's best
stories tend to be his shortest, where the economy of detail and narrow
focus allow his densely packed, lyric sentences to resonate. The same
lyricism can have the reverse effect in some of the longer works, making
it difficult to distinguish what's important from all the subtle background
noise. Taken as a whole, however, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the
Dead is an impressive and darkly humorous debut collection—well
worth every baby sacrificed in the making. [AW]
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