Identity Club

When you sit down and read several pieces by one writer at once, certain proclivities and patterns begin to present themselves. About the short fiction of Richard Burgin, you can’t help but notice an abundance of dark alleys, strange, solitary men, obsessive thoughts, madness, and hookers. Still, something else that leaps out: a certain fondness for the word *somehow*. “Could he have forgotten to bring it somehow?,” frets one freaked-out guy who’s misplaced his packet of pills. “Had it somehow fallen out?” Far from a filler word, in these instances *somehow* feels like the perfect sentiment for these sad souls, set adrift as they are in bleak cityscapes, alienated from each other and from themselves, some of them committing heinous acts without totally understanding what they’ve done. Victims of the universe, of the somehows of life, none of these folks seem to know who’s steering the ship.

Scary. Indeed, some of these intelligent stories straddle the horror/mystery genre. But if the collection as a whole is representative, Burgin masters, or at least comes to life in, another kind of short story: one that specializes in the malice just under the surface of everyday interactions, particularly those between men and women. “Carbo’s” lasts the span of a sickeningly bad dinner date. (And we all know how long that is.) In “Vacation,” Gary, a loner who seems sort of creepy at first and is eventually revealed as a full-fledged nutcase, can’t even tell if the woman he’s with *is* one.

At times, Burgin calls to mind the early, bad-marriage-obsessed stories of Gilbert Sorrentino, with his bleak and only spottily humorous depictions of the failure of men and women to understand each other. Or, more accurately, of men to understand women. Burgin’s are visceral, intense stories of alienation, almost all of them with a male protagonist, and women keep popping up like cardboard figures in one of those Old West shootemup games. Sometimes they’re prostitutes, sometimes recalcitrant dates, and sometimes mothers, and it only ends well for them if the shooter’s aim is bad.

Another well-tread, and frighteningly well-wrought, idea in these stories is the process of becoming unglued. In “The Spirit of New York” a man describes getting his kicks from popping out from behind something and startling strangers—a slow disintegration that goes from bad to worse. In“Ghost Parks,” which is more about that one moment everything can change, a man climbs in bed beside his wife after his plan to have her killed falls through. To hear Burgin tell it, you could be balancing on a knife blade even when you think you’re doing all right.

In the midst of all this darkness, Burgin does occasionally smirk at the absurdity of it all. The fellow from “Spirit” has one delightfully perverse line about two people he’s about to scare: “They were talking to each other very animatedly, and they were both wearing navy blue, which is one of my favorite colors to scare people in.”

Above all, maybe, these are CITY stories, and Burgin gets it all in there: loneliness, homelessness, prostitution and pickup basketball games. Burgin sets them in New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia—it almost doesn’t matter. “It could have been any city,” as a character who’s on the run thinks to himself. “It was just a matter of which plane to catch.” But there is one fantastic joke on Philly. In the macabre story “The Horror Conference,” a woman who claims to have spent a few months in Hell is asked where, exactly, Hell is. “OK, it’s not like other places, like any other place. It’s portable, OK? It chose, a month ago, to be in my particular building and in the block around it in Philadelphia.”

Somehow, we can picture it.