FRAME STORY

Migliore’s short story collection dishes out dread, violence, and gallows humor in equal measure.

In “Museum of the Dead,” a man inherits his mortician father’s funeral home. There isn’t much he can do with it, as a miracle drug has all but eliminated natural death; that is, until he meets someone who may be able to help him “drum up some business.” Other tales herein are equally somber: In “The MacGuffin,” a woman trails a dizzying string of text messages from an anonymous person claiming to have kidnapped her daughter. “Popular Genocide” unfolds at a therapeutic boarding school that feels more like a prison camp. Nevertheless, particular moments or even entire stories are funny, though the comedy is decidedly dark. “Fandomon” is an amusing play on Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon: Several characters involved in an incident at an anime convention relay their versions of something that happened in a hotel room. Each person’s bizarre account, despite similarities, is drastically different from the rest. Two of the best stories are the interlinked “The Running of the Dead Horse” and “Ancestry,” which bookend this collection. In the former, university professor Rita is shaken by her younger sister’s violent murder, especially as the recording of the event is readily available online. Her Italian grandfather, who helped raise the sisters, takes her on a journey to Rome to see family and later enact a bit of vengeance. The latter story finds Rita and a police captain looking into a shocking suicide and a mysterious organization tied to her late parents.

The author’s tales navigate through such bleak territories as homicide, nuclear strikes, and other assorted crimes. It’s hardly surprising that violence marks many of the stories, from bites and stabbings to meticulously detailed head shots. But Migliore deftly leavens the heaviness with satire: The dialogue-only “Suicide Hotline” features a crisis counselor whose prepared script implacably renders their responses mechanical and hollow. The author displays a knack for direct, concise sentences that stoke the narrative pace: “Trinice wiggled around. Her damp suit made the seat slippery. She couldn’t lean back because her arms were cuffed behind her. She was forced to press the side of her head up against the bulletproof glass divider.” While well-drawn characters (including Rita and her grandfather) pop up throughout this collection, the cast is largely aloof or hateful. They spew homophobic, xenophobic, and generally offensive slurs and sentiments that complement the savage acts they perpetrate. Readers won’t sympathize with most of them, particularly the nasty American soldier stationed in Japan who seems to detest everything and everyone (“The Tattoo”). Stories such as these aren’t prone to happy endings, but that doesn’t make the book predictable. “Anticks,” which follows a ventriloquist and his maybe-alive doll, alludes to the 1978 film Magic that seemingly inspired it; despite that grounding, the story spins off into an unexpected and deliriously entertaining direction.

A memorable batch of unnerving tales.