The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

A good book, one of my favorites of 2011.

I didn’t give it a perfect rating, but only because I liked Wilson’s previous book, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, so much that it’s a tough act to follow.

A lot of what came through again, however, is a lot of what made Tunneling so great. There’s a main course of dark sweetness in the characters, and oddity is a side dish.

The thing that really works for me about Wilson’s books is that he has a good handle on the bizarre, but he also has the good sense to use it sparingly, just enough that you don’t feel like a book is all about creating these insane situations. There are plenty of books out there that are all about the bizarre, and if a book is balls-out insane (see Satan Burger) I can deal. Then there are books that are bizarre, but in a more hip way that’s harder to understand. A lot of your beat generation falls into that category. That’s great for people who are into that, people who I would say are welcome to enjoy their Clove cigarettes, thin bicycles, and silly facial hair, and I will not encroach on their freedom to do so just so long as they don’t mind the fact that I can’t always stop my lips from forming a derisive sneer.

Kevin Wilson is a really talented writer because he can incorporate the bizarre, but it never feels like that’s the focal point of the story. The characters are engaged in these offbeat scenarios, but you get the feeling that the characters themselves are not super comfortable with the level of strangeness either. The characters feel so real, and you get to see a real-seeming person go through something very strange, which is the appeal of something strange in the first place, in my opinion. Using an example from one of his stories, reading about a fairly ordinary man whose parents spontaneously combusted is interesting and engaging. Spellbinding, to use movie critic terms. But if the book were about a Cyclops whose parents exploded and his only fried was a lady with three eyes, the strangeness becomes mundane, and then the story has no life.

To put it more concisely, he uses the appeal of the strange just enough to make the work interesting, but not so much that the strange becomes the norm, thereby diluting its power. It makes for good, literary fiction that can be enjoyed on a level of being just plain fun at the same time.

I love it, and I’ll be first in line for whatever he comes out with next.