If you’re in the mood for some short stories, here’s a collection I came across about a year ago: Everybody Loves Somebody, by Joanna Scott.
According to The Washington Post, Everyody Loves Somebody is "mostly about men, women or children who have lost their way — hapless unfortunates as frail as minnows in the tumbling ocean. They possess neither control nor knowledge of their own lives. They are perishable. They — or their forlorn little hopes — often perish."
Sounds depressing, I know. The Post says, "Taken together, these stories are overwhelmingly melancholy." But a different Post reviewer says, "Scott excels at creating subtle methods of foreboding that, regardless of whether they come to fruition, will keep you enrapt."
Another review on Bestsellersworld.com agrees that this book is engaging:
As you read each story they will hold you in awe because they are so different from anything else you might have read. The author does a wonderful job of setting the stage for the story and draws the reader in from the beginning and continues to captivate them from there. As I read each story, I felt like I was being taking to a different dimension – almost like the old ‘Twilight Zone’ shows. If you are looking for something to captivate you and for stories that are quite different from your normal everyday read, this is the book for you.
And finally, from Entertainment Weekly:
Reading the vivid, elliptical Joanna Scott’s superb new stories in Everybody Loves Somebody is like observing humanity through a sensitive surveillance camera. In ”The Lucite Cane,” Scott takes snapshots of drivers at a traffic light, then moves to a park, then a seedy grocery, then a bar, picking up narrative snippets tangentially related to an old man with a cane. The title story follows a businessman as he drives through the dark, making a series of loopy mental calculations. In Scott’s off-kilter tales, life is governed by chance, we are less logical than we think, and the world is full of mystery.
Has anyone read this book yet?