PROPER IMPOSTERS

Four fiction writers present four pieces that have their length, if nothing else, in common.

In Mauricio Montiel Figueiras’ “Crowd,” an accountant commuting to work encounters a demonstration against his dodgy employer, a pencil-manufacturing company. Protesters’ placards read “End the graphite oppression” and “More heat, less writing.” In Jeff Parker’s “G v. P,” Nikolai Gogol and Edgar Allan Poe, each at the end of his life, independently reflect on their friendship; they met when the mortified Gogol was rounding up copies of his poorly reviewed book. In Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s “Lalita”—the only story of the four that cleaves to realism—a Yale sophomore resolves to lose her virginity by seducing Noah, “whom she didn’t love, and who clearly wasn’t all that into her either,” as part of her “plan to set herself free” from her controlling mother. And in Jason Ockert’s “The Body Collector,” a severely overweight man on the brink of death by heart attack makes a deal with the story’s titular devil-like spirit. Ockert’s piece is the anthology’s standout. It nimbly incorporates aspects of mystery, horror, and farce, written with crackerjack precision. The chains on a playground’s vandalized swings are “looped over the metal set’s top pole like jewelry on a lunatic.” Less easy to understand than the four stories’ plotlines is the rationale for binding these pieces together. Despite the book’s title, there’s no obvious unifier here; each story is tainted by behavior that qualifies as deceptive but to no greater degree than what’s found in a typical work of fiction. Of course, if the idea is simply to bundle together strong novellas by a quartet of published writers, then the book succeeds handily.

Conceptually non-cohesive but largely surreal and collectively strong.