Rating: 
Summary: Stories of the Non-Glamourous life
Review: Among the Missing is filled with great stories, stories about the kinds of people you wouldn't ordinarily hear about. An 18 year old punk guitarist bringing his dad cross-country in the hopes that his dad loses his suicidal tendencies. A thirty-year old man still covering up his illicit behavior from fifteen years ago that may have lead to the disappearance of a friend. These are not the beautiful people, but these are beautiful stories. Dan Chaon is a talented writer with a knack of being able to tell a sordid story in an almost poetic manner. Enjoy these stories.
Rating:
Summary: Among the better collections
Review: Chaon's stories somehow all feel so real. The situations, the relationships, the feelings and motivations, they just seem so plausible, more so than any other short story collection I've read. Some of the stories have made me nostalgic about my own past, and relationships with family.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, dark, haunting stories...
Review: Dan Chaon's Among the Missing is a wonderful short-story collection, a collection with tremendous depth and imagination. Chaon's stories are all richly told and engrossing, each giving us their own world. What is remarkable about his stories, and what sets this collection off from most others out today is his focus on what goes on in the minds of truly sick, perverted people. This focus adds an additional layer to the stories and makes them somehow richer. There are stories here centered on child sexual abuse and other disturbing subject matters. Chaon does not shy away from the jarring nature of the characters and their stories and because of this, these stories have additional layers of meaning. My favorite stories are "Among the Missing," "Prodigal," "Burn with Me," and "Safety Man." Those stories are dark, beautiful and haunting. All of the stories are terrific. Pick them up.
Rating:
Summary: No duds here!
Review: I am not typically a reader of short story collections, there are usually too many mediocre efforts thrown in with the odd good one. What a pleasant surprize to find a collection of superb short stories, no duds in the bunch. These are not happy tales, most of them are odd, unnerving and even disturbing. Something or someone is "missing" in each story. The reader is taken on a sometimes shocking, sometimes subtle ride through the secret thoughts and actions of it's characters. My personal favorites were, I demand to know where you're taking me, Among the missing and Here's a little something to remember me by. If you are a reader of short stories (or not), you will not be disappointed with this effort.
Rating:
Summary: No duds here!
Review: I am not typically a reader of short story collections, there are usually too many mediocre efforts thrown in with the odd good one. What a pleasant surprize to find a collection of superb short stories, no duds in the bunch. These are not happy tales, most of them are odd, unnerving and even disturbing. Something or someone is "missing" in each story. The reader is taken on a sometimes shocking, sometimes subtle ride through the secret thoughts and actions of it's characters. My personal favorites were, I demand to know where you're taking me, Among the missing and Here's a little something to remember me by. If you are a reader of short stories (or not), you will not be disappointed with this effort.
Rating:
Summary: One of the absolute best
Review: I loved these stories. I had to pace myself and read only a couple each night and when I finished I went right back and started again.
They have the same obscure fascination as stories by Graham Greene and the same clarity in the writing. They ring of real life with no forced conclusions and no pretence or sentimentality. Just the best.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best collections I've ever read
Review: In most "good" short story collections, the "great"-to-"clunker" ratio seems to run about 50-50. Let's face it. It's damn hard to come up with a dozen good-and-different ideas, situations, and/or conflicts; people these situations with compelling and well-drawn characters; and provide some sort of satisfying conclusion in about 20 pages of copy. Many published collections even get by with one or two decent stories (aided by a fluke publication in "The NewYorker"), and the rest are not-ready-for-prime-time "filler." So, turning the pages of Dan Chaon's collection, "Among the Missing," you might feel like you've fallen into some great dream. Story after mind-blowing story, you keep waiting to wake-up to reality, to finally hit a clunker, but it never comes. "Among the Missing" truly deserves the superlative kudos blurbing its book jacket, (and it probably deserved the National Book Award, as well).
There is something or someone "missing" from each of the stories in this perfectly-titled collection. Although not ghost stories, the characters here are plenty haunted - most by a deep sense of absence. "Safety Man" touchingly paints a young widow's dependency on an inflatable version of a man to protect her family and herself, now that her husband is gone. In "Passengers, Remain Calm," another man has abandoned his family, leaving his eight-year-old son fatherless until his conflicted younger brother steps into that role. In the wonderful, "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me," a woman is haunted by her imprisoned brother-in-law and the knowledge of his guilt, and takes-out her lonely rage on a nasty-mouthed parrot. And, in my favorite of these great stories - "Here's a Little Something to Remember Me By" - an adult man recalls and relives the disappearance of a teenage friend, and the secrets about the missing boy that he's never told, and never will tell.
It's a great treat to find a short story that dazzles you, shocks you, touches you, makes you laugh and is written with elegance, power and beauty. Finding a dozen of them - as you do in Dan Chaon's "Among the Missing" - is amazing. This collection is an amazing literary accomplishment.
Rating:
Summary: Most Enlightening!
Review: It's amazing, in a sad way, how many readers believe the short story genre to be either a training ground for the young novelist, or fiction light. If I had a nickel, as the saying goes, for every time someone has refused a story collection because she wanted something more "substantial," I'd be lolling around on a beach somewhere. These days, lots of great story collections are proving these people wrong. Dagoberto Gilb's "Woodcuts of Women," Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," Justin Cronin's "Mary and O'Neill," Ha Jin's "Bridegroom" and Elizabeth Stuckey-French's "First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa" are some of the strongest collections in a half century-and all appeared in the last 3 years. Dan Chaon's "Among the Missing" joins these fine collections. Suffused with Midwestern loneliness, Chaon's stories are sometimes raw, but always clever. The cover design, whose single image-a copper-colored bird cage against a white plane-which will explain itself in one of the stories, prepares us for the Zen-like clarity of the tales to follow, and the theme of those missing (as the bird cage is empty, its door swung eerily open). These stories are not like a Wally Lamb novel, crammed so full of images that it's nearly exhausting (and I say this having liked very much "She's Come Undone," by the way). Instead, there is a lot of mental white space in each story so that the scenes within stand as solitary and three dimensional as the bird cage on the cover. I can't imagine, for example, charging on to the next story after reading "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me;" the end of that story demands a breather. A few characters here are awakening out of deceptions they have created to keep their lives a bit tidy, and it is during these stories that the untidying begins. It is for this reason, then, that the book title is more than just one of the story titles having floated to the top. So many people in this book have gone missing. In the opening story, "Safety Man" a young widow works to keep going after her husband's death; in the title story the narrator's mother mysteriously disappears; in "Here's a Little Something to Remember Me By," the narrator continues to struggle with the aftermath of his childhood friend's disappearance 15 years earlier, and in "Passengers Remain Calm," a young man helps care for his nephew after the boy's father leaves home, likely for good. If it sounds as if these stories are a bit haunting, they are. The emotionally windswept characters in "Among the Missing" struggle to keep on keeping on, and in the face of the disappearance of others, confront absent parts of themselves as well. So, in this way there's a double dose of loss here-actual people are lost and then the characters left behind tally up their own losses besides. It's all a bit grim, but wonderful. Chaon writes clearly, directly. Sentences are re-read for their simple elegance, the stories re-read for their dark pleasure, and the characters revisited for their odd familiarity. Good for Dan Chaon, who writes so much life truth within his fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing Missing Here
Review: It's amazing, in a sad way, how many readers believe the short story genre to be either a training ground for the young novelist, or fiction light. If I had a nickel, as the saying goes, for every time someone has refused a story collection because she wanted something more "substantial," I'd be lolling around on a beach somewhere. These days, lots of great story collections are proving these people wrong. Dagoberto Gilb's "Woodcuts of Women," Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," Justin Cronin's "Mary and O'Neill," Ha Jin's "Bridegroom" and Elizabeth Stuckey-French's "First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa" are some of the strongest collections in a half century-and all appeared in the last 3 years. Dan Chaon's "Among the Missing" joins these fine collections. Suffused with Midwestern loneliness, Chaon's stories are sometimes raw, but always clever. The cover design, whose single image-a copper-colored bird cage against a white plane-which will explain itself in one of the stories, prepares us for the Zen-like clarity of the tales to follow, and the theme of those missing (as the bird cage is empty, its door swung eerily open). These stories are not like a Wally Lamb novel, crammed so full of images that it's nearly exhausting (and I say this having liked very much "She's Come Undone," by the way). Instead, there is a lot of mental white space in each story so that the scenes within stand as solitary and three dimensional as the bird cage on the cover. I can't imagine, for example, charging on to the next story after reading "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me;" the end of that story demands a breather. A few characters here are awakening out of deceptions they have created to keep their lives a bit tidy, and it is during these stories that the untidying begins. It is for this reason, then, that the book title is more than just one of the story titles having floated to the top. So many people in this book have gone missing. In the opening story, "Safety Man" a young widow works to keep going after her husband's death; in the title story the narrator's mother mysteriously disappears; in "Here's a Little Something to Remember Me By," the narrator continues to struggle with the aftermath of his childhood friend's disappearance 15 years earlier, and in "Passengers Remain Calm," a young man helps care for his nephew after the boy's father leaves home, likely for good. If it sounds as if these stories are a bit haunting, they are. The emotionally windswept characters in "Among the Missing" struggle to keep on keeping on, and in the face of the disappearance of others, confront absent parts of themselves as well. So, in this way there's a double dose of loss here-actual people are lost and then the characters left behind tally up their own losses besides. It's all a bit grim, but wonderful. Chaon writes clearly, directly. Sentences are re-read for their simple elegance, the stories re-read for their dark pleasure, and the characters revisited for their odd familiarity. Good for Dan Chaon, who writes so much life truth within his fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Alfred Hitchcock Meets Raymond Carver
Review: Penetrating stories about many things that is left unsaid in our lives, especially within families. Wrong decisions, sinister possibilities, regrets, premonitions, embarrassing memories, parents and loved ones who suddenly disappear one day and are never heard from again... These are moving and memorable stories with danger lurking right along the surface, but always revolving around the dilemmas of human condition at their center. A married woman with children who ends up living with an inflatable doll... A macaw who talks too much and utters very dangerous things each time he opens his beak... Fathers and sons, trying to make peace with themselves while opening some old doors in their lives that perhaps should never have been touched... Many haunting stories about relationships not consummated to their fullest, lives impacted by the memories of others far away. The writer holds a powerful projector to the amazing complexity and darkness of the human predicament in passages like: "How many small, offhand choices had led her to the college where they met, had led her to the room where they first looked at one another... How many people were forever different, how many people ceased to exist every time she turned one way rather than another? Surely, if it were so random, she could not be held accountable?" (Prosthesis, p. 159) But there is still hope that we can turn things around perhaps with the right intuition and perspective: "What if you believed that everything in life was like a prize? What if you thought of the world as a big random drawing, and you were always winning things, the world offering them up with a big grin, like an emcee's: Here you go, Hollis. Here is a motorcycle. Here is a little boy who loves you. Here is a weird experience..." (Passengers, Remain Calm, p. 116) Dan Chaon, like Ethan Canin, is fast becoming one of my most favorite fiction writers from the younger generation. There are plenty writers out there who can come up with "interesting" characters and spin a page-turner "plot." But rare are those specially gifted pens who can reach the hidden corners of our souls and address all those fears, unspoken hurts and unrealized dreams like Chaon. A must read if you love short stories.
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