A collection of short slice-of-life stories with odd twists, strange premises, and quirky characters.
In this anthology, Carlos Perez offers a series of very short tales about characters struggling with everything from an all-devouring carpet to the aftermath of child sexual abuse. Each of these stories is a stand-alone work, with its own particular quirks, although a couple of them have appeared before in the author’s previous work, School Days. 24 Tales is subtitled In Rememberance of the Forgotten and Abused, and most of the stories center around a central character who is somehow lost, broken, or wounded due to human cruelty or an uncaring society.
The brevity of the stories and their almost dreamlike quality makes them memorable, giving the best among them an emotional force all out of proportion to their size. Some take place in perfectly normal settings, with ordinary people, while others offer a more distorted view of reality, but in none of them is everything all right with the world. Though there is not as much of a continuing theme as there was in the author’s SCHOOL DAYS, there is a common emotional thread, an uneasy and unsettling emotional tone, that provides a link between the stories. That emotional theme returns and reinforces itself in different forms and characters from story to story, adding to the sense of unease as the stories continue without making them too repetitive or alike. Some of the stories, in particular “The Importance of Superheroes” and “The Dancer” achieve an evocative and painful sense of loneliness and loss that lingers well after the story ends, a sensation deftly communicated without much more than a few simple word pictures.
In places, the stories can feel a bit too dark, with characters drifting on occasion into a sense of overblown melodrama, even self-pity. At times, the author gets a bit too carried away with his characters’ cruelty to each other, as in stories like “Needles and Pins,” and their emotional realism is somewhat marred as a result. The unrelenting darkness of the stories’ tone will appeal to some, but may be difficult reading for those looking for something with a bit of cheer or hope to it.
24 TALES TO PASS THE TIME is an imaginative and largely well-drawn set of stories, with settings and characters that range from slightly off-beat to nightmarishly unbalanced.
Reviewed by Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader