Don’t Kiss Me, Lindsay Hunter’s second collection of ultrashort fiction—26 stories in 192 pages—gives voice to a strange and often disturbing cast of characters who abuse and are abused by the people around them. The writing is unconventional: single-sentence prose poems without terminal punctuation, short paragraphs in all caps, a faux-dramatic script. This formal experimentation is a decided strength of Hunter’s; so is her ear for pleasant-sounding phonetic figures, as in her description of Peggy Paula, a woman, like many here, devoid of self-esteem: “her lips cherry red and raw when she saw her reflection in the toaster.” Yet the collection is pervaded by perverse cruelty. Horrifying plots function more as vehicles for the formal play—always a danger in flash fiction—than as opportunities to explore the psychology of cruelty. As one character laments in the story “RV People,” “We forget who of us did the killing, it don’t matter.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
By Lindsay Hunter (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Reading Sat 8/17, 7 PM
Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincolnbookcellarinc.com
