Short Story Wednesday: Thrilling Tales

 

Early this week, I started reading stories in McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon. I was a little bit confused by the introduction, which seemed to be describing what kind of stories would be in the book, but did not help me at all. The title indicates that the stories would be thrilling, but the four stories I read were not in any way thrilling. That description makes it sound like I did not like the stories, but I did, for the most part. 

My favorite story was "Chuck’s Bucket" by Chris Offutt. That story was all over the place, with time travel and a ghost and alternate universes. Plus the main character was Chris Offutt himself, writing about his difficulties in writing the story. Because he thinks that there is a ghost in his apartment, he goes to visit a university professor to ask for help. Instead his professor decides to use Chris as the subject for a time travel experiment. I liked that story very much; it was original and fun.

In "Blood Doesn't Come Out" by Michael Crichton, a private investigator's day starts off badly. He proves that an employee was stealing from his store, but it turns out that the guilty employee was the employer's lover, and the employer is very unhappy with the result. Then the PI's girlfriend walks out on him. From there, things go from bad to worse. The story was good and the ending was unexpected. 

"Private Grave 9" by Karen Joy Fowler was more of a supernatural story. It is set at an archaeological dig in Mesopotamia, around the same time as Howard Carter's dig. Those at the dig are unhappy because they are not finding anything as important as Howard Carter was finding at Tutankhamen's tomb. Finally they find the royal tomb of a princess. The narrator of the story is a photographer and takes photos of all the finds. On the photo of the princess, a face was superimposed over the skull. It was an interesting story because of the setting, and I like Fowler's writing, but it did not seem to go anywhere.

The last story I read, Aimee Bender’s "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers," was closest to a mystery puzzle. A married couple is found dead in a room, the wife poisoned, the husband stabbed. The strange thing is that they have a collection of salt and pepper shakers. The police detective who narrates the story wonders if they killed each other. The end of the story is inconclusive. It was a decent story but not really satisfying. 

I will continue reading the stories in this book. The full list of authors and stories is below: 

• Jim Shepard’s "Tedford and the Megalodon"
• Glen David Gold’s "The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter"
• Dan Chaon’s "The Bees"
• Kelly Link’s "Catskin"
• Elmore Leonard’s "How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman"
• Carol Emshwiller’s "The General"
• Neil Gaiman’s "Closing Time"
• Nick Hornby’s "Otherwise Pandemonium"
• Stephen King’s "The Tale of Gray Dick"
• Michael Crichton’s "Blood Doesn’t Come Out"
• Laurie King’s "Weaving the Dark"
• Chris Offutt’s "Chuck’s Bucket"
• Dave Eggers’s "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly"
• Michael Moorcock’s "The Case of the Nazi Canary"
• Aimee Bender’s "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers"
• Sherman Alexie’s "Ghost Dance"
• Harlan Ellison’s "Goodbye to All That"
• Karen Joy Fowler’s "Private Grave 9"
• Rick Moody’s "The Albertine Notes"
• Michael Chabon’s "The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance"

Spell the Month in Books — July 2025

Spell the Month in Books is a monthly meme hosted by Jana at Reviews from the Stacks. The link up post is posted on the first Saturday of each month. Each month one or two themes are suggested for the books that are chosen. The theme for July is “set in a fantasy world or fictional place!”

This is the first time I have done this meme, and I am very late. 

 

J is for Just One Damned Thing after Another by Jodi Taylor

This is the first book in a time-travel series. The main protagonists are historians from St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research. Each has a special area of expertise but the assignments may take them to any time in the past. The story carries you along pell mell through adventure after adventure, and the historians find out that there are lots of challenges ahead.  I think that there are now 14 books in the series, and I have read the first two books. 

U is for Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett. 

Terry Pratchett is well-known for his fantasy books set in the Discworld Universe. I am no expert on the books in this series; I have only read two of them. But I did enjoy those. I read The Light Fantastic, the second book in the series. Later I read Mort, the first book in the Death Series. Unseen Academicals is set at a university where the wizards must win a game of football without using magic. It is a later book in the series, #37.

L is for The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. 

This is a space opera. To get away from an unhappy event in her past, Rosemary Harper joins the small crew of a ship that creates tunnels through space for faster travel. She is the clerk, taking care of ordering and forms and such. Some of the crew is human and others are various types of aliens.

I liked the various aliens and their different gifts, needs and culture. The author did a great job with differentiating between the characters. Many of the characters are quirky and everyone has to learn to accept the quirks on a long journey in a small ship.

Y is for The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.

This novel crosses genres, being both an alternate history and a mystery, with elements of a conspiracy thriller. This book came to my attention via my husband, who read it first and recommended it to me. The setting is an alternate universe where Jewish refugees and their descendants have been allowed to in live the Federal District of Sitka, in Alaska. At the point the novel begins, the District is about to revert to Alaskan control.

Y is for The Yiddish Policemen's Union

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel written by Michael Chabon. It crosses genres, being both an alternate history and a mystery, with elements of a conspiracy thriller. This book came to my attention via my husband, who read it first. And liked it well enough to keep it and recommend it to me.

The premise of this book, as described on the flyleaf of the book:

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.

The story centers around a police detective, Meyer Landsman, and his partner, Berko. Meyer is Jewish, Berko is half Tlingit (and they are cousins). They are trying to resolve their open cases before they turn over their jobs to whatever agency takes over after the "Reversion." Complicating this scenario is their boss, Bina, who is Meyer's ex-wife. Bina is a "by the book" detective, Meyer is the opposite. And Meyer and Berko are told to drop their work on the case that this book revolves around. Of course, they do not.

I am featuring this novel as my selection for the letter Y in the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme, sponsored by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise. Please visit the post at Mysteries in Paradise to check out other entries for this letter. 

Critiquing a book by a renowned writer like Michael Chabon is hard. The novel won a number of science fiction awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel. In looking at reviews, I noticed that opinions were all over the place and the things I liked bothered other readers, and vice versa. As I read this book I had some nits to pick, but overall this was a good reading experience for me.


The book resembles a noir novel with a flawed detective and a crime that seems to be one thing but turns out to be much more. I got involved in the mystery and Meyer Landsman's story immediately. Some readers found the story slow; my husband commented on this when reading the first half, then found it improved from that point on. The plot was convoluted and it took a long time to uncover the immensity of the crime, but I imagine that is what real police work is like. I did find the mystery to be resolved to my satisfaction.

Chabon builds an alternate world in this book, with its own vocabulary, that I found at times distracting. There were invented words that were similar to Yiddish terms (I think). However, I adapted early on. I would find fault with the writing, then gradually adjust to things that were bothering me. My only complaint about the way he presents this world is that he ekes out the knowledge to the reader. Up until about halfway through the novel, I was very irritated at this.

Chabon writes beautiful descriptions, and at times these pop up just out of the blue, seemingly. But it was possible to the enjoy his descriptions and not get pulled out of the story. This example combines his skill at description and an invented word, the "shtekeleh":

The Filipino-style Chinese donut, or shtekeleh, is the great contribution of the District of Sitka to the food lovers of the world. In its present form, it cannot be found in the Philippines. No Chinese trencherman would recognize it as the fruit of his native fry kettles. Like the storm god Yahweh of Sumeria, the shtekeleh was not invented by the Jews, but the world would sport neither God nor the shtekeleh without Jews and their desires. A panatela of fried dough not quite sweet, not quite salty, rolled in sugar, crisp-skinned, tender inside, and honeycombed with air pockets. You sink it in your paper cup of milky tea and close your eyes, and for ten fat seconds, you seem to glimpse the possibility of finer things.

One thing I had a hard time adapting to was the use of present tense narrative. However, like all of the other complaints I had as I began reading... I eventually got used to it.

I found the overall story of the Reversion and the unknown fate of the Jews in Sitka depressing, and Meyer's view on life was depressing. There was no possibility for a real happy ending, but the book did not end on a negative note. Thus, the book was dark, but not ultimately a downer.

This book is not an easy read. I did not find it to be so, and I don't think that I am alone. The story is heavily built around Jewish culture, which makes sense given the plot. But as I don't have in-depth knowledge of Jewish culture, I don't know how much I missed. Chess was also central to the plot, and I have no background in chess. Nevertheless, I think I got the points he was making in the use of chess in the story. And I found it interesting. This book was definitely worth the effort.

Michael Chabon is not known as a mystery writer. This excerpt from his Wikipedia page describes his works and the themes he uses, most of which do show up in this novel:

His work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes, including nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.