The Brink

Starred review from February 23, 2015
Bunn’s debut story collection mixes genres and styles in 10 ambitious, impressive tales. Among the strongest are “Getting There & Away”—a near perfect story that involves a honeymoon, a lost ring, an explosion, and the Bali nightlife—and “Ledge,” concerning a ship in the late 15th century that discovers the literal end of the Earth and a passageway between the living and the dead. Bunn drops his characters in a variety of locales: summer school, a basement, a Second Life–like virtual world, and the Heaven’s Gate cult just prior to its mass suicide in 1997. And while many of his stories speak to the ideas of physical and emotional loss, the author’s fearlessness in constructing interesting protagonists prevents any moments of déjà vu for the reader. These characters are uncomfortable in their own skin. Both “Ledge” and “Curious Father” contain men questioning their sexuality. And sometimes, these characters also create reader discomfort. “Griefer” finds a man so obsessed with technology that he fails to pay attention to his family, and in “When You Are the Final Girl,” Bunn crafts a particularly threatening protagonist in Randy, a man bent on drugging a teenage girl after a car accident disfigures his face. This is a compelling collection, and several of the stories are breathtaking.

February 15, 2015
In this wide-ranging collection, characters must cope with changing, hazardous landscapes and wrestle with fundamental truths about themselves.The stories in Bunn's collection are a disparate bunch, ranging from realistic period pieces to studies of intimacy and sexuality to fundamentally altered takes on history. "When You Are the Final Girl" riffs on horror-film tropes, as its protagonist's reaction to past trauma is to become knowingly monstrous, while "How to Win an Unwinnable War" taps into Cold War fear to tell the story of a teenager channeling anxiety at his parents' crumbled marriage into simulations of nuclear war. Bunn also ventures into less realistic territory with "Griefer," largely set in the final days of an online role-playing game slated for shutdown-though the juxtaposition of this with ripples in its narrator's marriage leads to one of the book's neater conclusions. "Ledge" takes the opposite approach: What begins as a story of nautical intrigue and repressed desire around the time of Queen Isabella's reign in Spain slowly becomes something far more mysterious, playing off the reader's expectations of history and realism. Some of this collection's most impressive moments come when delving into emotionally messy terrain. The protagonists of "Everything, All at Once" and "Curious Father" deal with the implosions of their marriages in very different ways: in the case of the former, via investigating her mother's romantic history; in the case of the latter, via a late-in-life reckoning with his sexuality. Bunn's compelling stories are at their best when navigating chaotic landscapes, whether emotional or literal.

March 1, 2015
The isolated, often sexually charged characters in Bunn's shimmering debut collection seek to shed the detritus of their insufferable existence for a fresh beginning, only to find the struggle to attain a new life even more challenging. Humorous and affirming, this is a varied endeavor. A divorce attempts to embrace his homosexual leanings after his daughter discovers his gay porn stash. A newlywed couple's search for the husband's missing wedding ring is interrupted by an unlikely terrorist attack. As his parents' marriage crumbles, a brainy teenager takes a summer course on nuclear war preparedness. An activist reassesses his politics after his bisexual lover meets an untimely death. An unemployed husband forsakes his drab reality for a virtual world in which he falls for the avatar of a player with covert intentions. And a high-school yearbook photo editor marred by a hideous facial scar falls for a flawless, unattainable 17-year-old. Each of Bunn's 10 stories is permeated by a comic sense of the inevitable hope in a future even his characters know is unlikely.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)