These Heroic, Happy Dead: Stories by Luke Mogelson
This is the last of the books I got from LibraryThing's EarlyReviewer program before I fell horribly behind and started being more selective about what I requested to keep my workload manageable. It's a collection of war-themed short fiction from 2016. Hardly "early," but finally the cloud of guilt will no longer hang over me when I request new books!
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| Collection published: 2016 Contents originally published: 2010-16 Acquired: January 2016 Read: June 2023 |
I don't have much to say about this book, to be honest. Mogelson doesn't seem to have actually attended an MFA program, but he has the kind of spare, observational, undistinctive style I associate with MFA programs. The stories are all war stories, but they focus on the people affected by war, not the fighting: damaged vets, family of veterans, people in combat. Too many are about men who become abusive toward their family. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but in Mogelson's hands these don't really rise above the level of cliché; they don't have much interesting to say about these kind of men. The mean thing to say would be that Luke Mogelson is no Tim O'Brien.
Still, there are a couple stories that stick in the mind a couple months later. I liked "New Guidance," about a translator assigned to a military unit whose always at a distance from everyone else, and "Kids," about a military base's strange relationship with local kids who might be working with terrorists. The best was "Visitors," about a woman whose veteran husband is in prison for killing a man, and who must navigate the weird terrain of her new life.
The back cover trumpets that characters recur between stories at different stages of their lives; I have seen this done well elsewhere, but I assume the back cover flags it up because the links are so slight, and add so little, that you wouldn't notice unless someone told you. There are probably people who will really like this book, but I just was not among them.
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