Brandon Getz reveals his bold yet tender fiction in ‘Stop Me’
There’s more than a little weirdness and shake in “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before,” by local author Brandon Getz, who, across 12 stories, delivers devils and demons. A story opens with a character waking “with pains in his chest and little bruises on his skin like he’d been pinched by children or goblins in his nightmares.”
There is also, in the very first story, a homunculus, which is a word I don’t believe I have ever come across in my reading life
(or in any other life, for that matter). In the fantastical yet quite real-feeling story “What Is There to Say,” a dying man has split open his head, resulting in the emergence of a wee aforementioned “homunculus” that espouses insights about the man to his daughter. I immediately Googled homunculus to discover that a homunculus means “a very small human or humanoid creature.” Think Alien, I suppose, but far kinder and chattier.
I shouldn’t have gone to Google so quickly, though. I should’ve trusted the writer, who, two pages later, after sufficiently freaking out the reader, takes a narrative step backward to ask “Why homunculus?” before defining and exploring the creature’s existence and the daughter’s decision to name it this strange word.
But the real reason I was so taken by this opening story was not because of its fantastical, absurdist homunculus. The drama, it turns out, is not that the creature exists; part of the drama concerns what will happen to the homunculus when the father finally succumbs to lung cancer. “One wonders,” the creature asks the daughter, “when there is no Ron…”
It is unusual for stories this strange to also be so tender. Many of Mr. Getz’s stories are interested in the unspoken frustrations between parents and children and also between parents and themselves. Visitation serves as something of a theme, as is the case in the story “Lesser Demons,” where three demons “the size of housecats” visit a new father, decorated in “chalky, pale skin [that] clings to their ribs and spines.”
Reading a story like “Lesser Demons” on a wintry day with a high Covid-case count provided this reader a welcome escape into a weird, slightly askew world. I confess that it also unnerved me to reflect on all the many demon-like thoughts that have tiptoed across these walls I’ve come to know quite well during the pandemic.
That reflection makes the collection sound overly dreary or existential, which it is not. I’m happy to report that “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before” is often fun and also quite funny. In the title story, where God and the Devil play chess, God has hair coiled “at the back of his head in a loose, unwashed bun, held in place with a No. 2 pencil.” It may be the case that “The whole Universe is in freeze-frame while the game’s in play,” but as the Devil and God trade talking points and barbs in an increasingly
“STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS BEFORE” By Brandon Getz Six Gallery Press ($14)
extended fashion, the chess pieces start to, shall way say, become romantically involved.
Certain stories, like “Robot on a Park Bench,” are a little more straightforward in their oddity—the gist of the story is right there in the title — but when Mr. Getz is at his best, he’s not content to introduce merely one oddity. He stacks one on top of others. There isn’t just a homunculus; it talks, and it’s got some concerns. God and the Devil aren’t the only players at the chess table; the pieces themselves are alive, too.
They’re the kind of stories that make me wish society at-large was more like smallpress fiction: bold yet tender, with an imperative to do things differently than what’s been done before.
Patrick McGinty teaches in the English Department at Slippery Rock University. His debut novel about the driverless car sector, “Test Drive,” was recently published by Propeller Books.