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Festival Author

Stories with bite

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published September 11, 2005

DOGS OF TRUTH

By Kit Reed

Tor, $14.95, 285 pp

Reviewed by COLETTE BANCROFT

Kit Reed is not very nice to her characters.

In Dogs of Truth, Reed's new collection of short stories, she sends a little girl into a house full of ghosts, a commuter onto what seems to be the train to purgatory and a pampered daughter on a journey in the belly of an alligator.

And in Grand Opening she drops novelist Salman Rushdie into the middle of the debut of the biggest shopping mall in the world and into the plot of a short story that eerily echoes that of Rushdie's brand-new novel Shalimar the Clown - in 10 pages instead of 416 (talk about an unkind cut).

Reed, who teaches at Wesleyan University, has been nominated for several science fiction and fantasy awards. Like her last novel, Thinner Than Thou, the stories in this collection fit into those genres, but many are first and foremost social satire.

Contemporary parenting theory takes a hit in Escape from Shark Island. The Dermotts become famous for their devotion to the family bed, the practice of children sharing their parents' sleeping space, "snug as bunnies in the nest." But, when a couple of the kids get old enough to chafe at "being jabbed by knees and elbows and sandpaper heels," they discover that growing up and moving on may not be an option.

In other stories, it's the kids who are scary. In The Shop of Little Horrors, a blissfully childless couple find themselves stalked by a baby stroller that's reminiscent of that evil truck in Steven Spielberg's Duel. In Playmate, a mother who wishes her rambunctious kid behaved more like his well-mannered pal gets her wish, sort of.

High Rise High is set in a fortress-style school designed not to keep the students safe but to keep them locked in. When they revolt, despite a bountiful supply of snacks, video games, makeup and motorcycles, a plucky FBI agent goes undercover to save them (and the city) from themselves - and finds that you never really graduate from high school.

In other stories, Reed tosses her characters into the middle of one Armageddon or the other, just to show us how they cope. In Captive Kong, a fellow named Trevor needs help in the midst of an unspecified catastrophe: "The skies are white all the time now, who's to say whether it's volcanic ash or human cremains or the glow of the unforeseeable?"

So he abducts a 300-pound female bodybuilder and holds her in a cell until she agrees to become his protector, with, as you might guess, some unintended consequences.

The family in Precautions has a different problem: "Pestilence is loose in the land," and exposure to a flu bug on the bus means death. They hire a service called De-con that keeps them safe, as long as they don't leave the house. So they order in food and Joan Rivers kaftans and defense missiles and, eventually, true love.

A few of these tales are even, in their own twisted way, love stories. The Zombie Prince turns on the agony of lost love and what we pay to recover from it. And Getting It Back is a downright cheerful story about an aging writer recovering his muse.

But that's a warm spot in a mostly chilly landscape. Reed's humor is as sharp and cool as the edge of an icicle. These Dogs of Truth have bite.

- Colette Bancroft is a Times staff writer.

[Last modified September 9, 2005, 11:58:41]