A film studies major gets a meat-processing job supervising the systematic dismemberment and disembowelment of chickens. A troubled loner finds the man of her dreams in a shoebox of horse figurines; a depressed mother is, riddled with anxiety about her toddler daughter's eerily coded accounts of a "ghost." The short stories in Melissa Reddish's newest collection, My Father Is An Angry Storm Cloud, reconfigure the boundaries between victim and aggressor, and between complicity and innocence, in exhilarating prose that is at once sensibly deadpan and mysteriously hallucinatory. College-educated, creative, and faced with no prospects to speak of, Reddish's hapless postmillennial protagonists stoically eke out monotonous existences as factory workers, retail sales clerks, and homemakers, staring down their limited lives even as the desperation of everyday life spirals into the no man's land between fantasy and psychosis. Yet they are also clear-eyed and conscious, calmly aware of-and uncannily receptive to, the most devastating of life's horrors. Elegant, perfectly controlled, and confidently weird, these brilliantly imagined short stories reveal the strangely satisfying world of a superbly talented practitioner.
