The Secret Goldfish : Stories

Rating:
Summary: A Terrific Collection!
Review: This inventive collection of stories revolves around the off-kilter - either something happens that cannot be explained or the characters are bewildered about how they came to be where they are. In the title story, a goldfish survives for nine years despite the odds in a murky, nearly airless tank while a marriage disintegrates. "Blown From the Bridge" tells of the last moments a young man shares with his lover before she and her car are blown off the Mackinac bridge, her fate sealed by a mysterious dedication to her father. The main character of "Lightning Man" cannot escape a lifetime of lightning strikes, but he continues anyway through his ruined and neurologically-fried life. "It Counts as Seeing" recounts the same incident of a blind man falling down the steps of a bank from multiple points-of-view so that this straightforward incident ends up being anything but.

The lyricism in Means's style elevates these seemingly simple stories to a more complex level, as the oddity of life is grounded in the beautiful language of the specific. In most of these stories, Means plays with form. The above mentioned story about the blind man challenges the use of first-person as reliable narrator. "Michigan Death Trip" eschews traditional narrative development by linking its vignettes not through character or plot, but through the end results. In some cases, the author fails, as in "The Nest" when a poignant story is interrupted by a break in form, but mostly he succeeds brilliantly.

These vibrant stories have the unexpected emotional impact of life itself. I highly recommend this collection to avid readers of short fiction.