Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

the long version

The stories in Kevin Wilson’s collection are populated by the strange and the fascinating: “Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider-a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. The young boy in “Birds in the House” is assigned the task of judging a bizarre origami contest, in which his father and uncles are competing for his grandmother’s estate. And in “Blowing Up On the Spot” the story singled out by Ann Patchett for Ploughshares, a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted. Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.