The Safety of Objects

This is a collection of short stories set in American suburbia, a place drawn here as surreal and strange yet entirely believable. The stories are provocative and darkly comic in tone, and they look hard at the American dream and the households built around it.

In A Real Doll, a teenage boy develops an erotic obsession with his sister's Barbie doll. In Looking for Johnny, a kidnapped boy falls short of what his abductors expected of him and is sent back home.

Adults Alone introduces Paul and Elaine, a yuppie couple who smoke crack and whose marriage careens out of control. The same pair later appear in the novel Music for Torching, so readers of that book can meet them here first.

The pictures of suburban life come in saturated, Kodacolor-bright colour, which makes the outrageous events feel sharper rather than softer. Expect short, unsettling pieces that favour the uncomfortable and the transgressive over reassurance. The collection suits readers who want fiction willing to go to odd and daring places.