Tenth of December

This is 4 stars for me instead of 5 is more related to personal idiosyncracy than anything else. I feel baffled reading the blurbs on the back cover: famous people are saying, “This is great comedy, threaded with tragedy!” and I'm all like, “This is great tragedy, threaded with comedy.” The just-slightly-futuristic and definitely dystopian tilt of many of these stories made them hard for me to stand because of how painfully accurate they seemed about certain aspects of our current world, even when I also really loved them. My tolerance for dark fiction is generally inversely proportional to how clinically raw my therapy caseload seems to me at the given moment, so that's that (I couldn't finishing watching “Chappie,” last night, for Pete's sake, because it was like watching child abuse, except with a robot).

What Sanders himself has to say about his darkness, though, is why I am glad to have read this collection (the following excepted from a conversation with David Sedaris at the back of the book):

“To some readers, this makes the stories seem a bit cruel. Of course, there is cruelty in the real world. And I'd argue that my stories are a good deal less cruel than the real world at its cruelest. We only need look at the newspaper or the history books to see that, over and over, things far too cruel to write have happened and are still happening. But I think what these readers may be feeling is that my stories are crueler than many other stories. And I think that's true...mine tend toward the cruel. And this may be - I mean, I think it is - a bit of a technical flaw, a sign of limitation on the part of the writer, a failure of subtlety....I'm trying to grow as a writer in such a way that I can produce more nuanced versions of the world. But I hope that in these new visions I retain some memory of the fact that cruelty is real - and it does its victims (and we are all its victims, to varying degree) no good to pretend that all thoughts of cruelty are extraneous, or gratuitous.”