STONE GODS

Golaski’s dreamlike short-story collection presents weird tales set in ordinary worlds.

Nothing is as it seems in these strange works. In “A Rainbow Summer,” for example, a child listens to their father’s story of Noah’s Ark, only to wake up the next day discovering that they are adrift at sea, surrounded by the sounds of wild animals. A man waits for his family to come home in the story “Stone Head,” but discovers that his house, and his city, have suddenly been overtaken by thick jungle. In the surreal “Little Stories,” a pair of editors for a literary magazine get together to arrange some impossibly frozen heads of lettuce. Golaski’s stories are uneasy in tone and vary in subject and form, but they’re unified in that each seems designed to unsettle and provoke the reader, revealing a mystery or image of unnatural transformation. In “Goddess of Loneliness,” written as a screenplay, it’s as if Golaski takes his cue from Ovid; a woman is a painting come to life, but by the end of the story she becomes stone. There’s magic in this continual transformation, this shifting of one thing into another. This story offers a helpful description of an artist’s studio as a “spectacular Francis Bacon mess,” and the transformation of Bacon into an adjective is a wonderful syntactic allegory for the way that Golaski transforms objects. Marys—literal and biblical—duplicate and proliferate in “Refrigerator-drome,” a story broken into small fragments that give greater importance to each piece, each image. In measured prose, Golaski’s work recalls that of H.P. Lovecraft with surreal shades of Leonora Carrington’s or Silvina Ocampo’s work. Logic goes out the window in these atmospheric, symbolic tales.

A celebration of the strange, cleverly told across stylistic forms.