Foot:: Pleasure Reading

Over the semester break, I read a series of short stories by Dan Chaon, entitled "Among the Missing." Chaon also wrote You Remind Me of Me, if anyone is familiar with that novel. Anyway, "Among the Missing" is really great collection of short stories by him and most of them are sort of scary, in a mental type of way. By this, I mean it's not some guy running around and killing people. I guess if you were to compare it to a movie, I would say something like Mr. Brooks, Disturbia, or even Zodiac. The terror comes from knowing that something out there isn't right and you're involved somehow.

One of my favorites was the opener, called "Safety Man." It's about a woman whose mother sends her one of those dolls that are supposed to look like real people.In Two and a Half Men episode I saw recently, Rose had a similar doll that she pretended was her husband to make Charlie jealous. Anyway, the woman and her husband treat Safety Man as a kind of joke until the husband dies and the woman starts to depend on the doll to make her feel safe. Without giving away too much, the story is mostly about how the woman deals with her grief and becomes so dependent of Safety Man.

My other favorite would have to be "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me." This is also about a woman, but mostly deals with the terror she feels about her brother-in-law, a man who has just been accused of rape, and I think murder (it's been awhile). While he's in prison, she has to take care of his macaw which repeats a lot of the brother-in-law's phrases, such as "Smell my feet." It sounds funny, but the story hints at a foot fetish the man had and the bird is really just creepy to read about.

There are of course many more really good stories in this collection and I highly recommend it to anyone. Dan Chaon is also an Ohio writer and a pretty local one at that. According to his biography in You Remind Me of Me he lives in Cleveland Heights and teachers at Oberlin. I think he is a really good write and his books, while not classics, would be interesting to teach in a class because there is so much going on.