DROLL TALES

Fourteen stories featuring deeply weird characters moving through surreal and—yes—droll circumstances.

If it’s the case that the opening story of a collection sets the tone for it, then readers can learn a lot from the opening of Smyles’ third book—following Dating Tips for the Unemployed (2016)—which begins with a glossary of “terms not found in this book.” Sample entries include “Apostrophe: any event occurring after a rophe” and “Lemon Merengue: to move like a whipped dessert.” This dad-joke bubble finally bursts after three pages, largely replaced by an approach that is part Monty Python and part René Magritte. (Though there are plenty of groaners like the above throughout.) Smyles knows her humor tends toward the surreal; she explicitly invokes that school in stories like “Exquisite Bachelor,” a nod to the exquisite corpse game favored by surrealists; the story itself imagines central figures of surrealism, from Dalí to Breton, competing on the reality show The Bachelor. The collection is bookended by two long stories: The opener, “Medusa’s Garden,” concerns a love triangle among the Guild of the Living Statues. In the closer, “O Lost,” a lovelorn professor meets a mysterious smuggler and her motley crew of friends who force the professor to question the very nature of reality. If any art is subjective, funny art is doubly so. Smyles’ jokes miss their mark as often as they land, partly due to the long, sometimes nearly hallucinatory tangents that pervade the collection, which can feel like Smyles merely writing for her own amusement. But at their best, the stories are erudite, original, and surprisingly poignant, as in the memorable “Contemporary Grammar,” in which a love story is told entirely through diagrammed sentences on a fifth grade English test.

An entertainingly eclectic, if self-indulgent, journey through the odder corners of existence.