Readers who are familiar with Richard Burgin's work (this is his 15th book) won't be surprised that most of the stories in this new collection are shot through with a creeping feeling, an unease that grows throughout the course of the story. Burgin has an instinctive feel for the things in everyday life that are just a little bit wrong, like adults who act more naive than they have any right to be, or houses that don't make any of the "little sounds that houses make" but instead are "as silent as a vault in a museum."
"Memo and Oblivion" in particular reads like a blend of horror and science fiction (though "Do You Like This Room" feels a little bit like what would happen if Edgar Allan Poe went on a date). Set within the confines of a sort of cult, it deals with two very contemporary ideas: overmedication and the longing for a clean slate, a return to innocence. (Memo and Oblivion are both names of pharmaceutical drugs, you see.) "The House," too, has a disturbing premise: A house and its eerie inhabitants lull visitors into a sense of safety before imprisoning them in something resembling a kind of suburban Dracula's castle.
But the truth is, though the stories are sometimes scary, most of them are far from supernatural. Most often they're about obsessive, lopsided relationships; tortured memories; the panicky angst of aging; in other words, the (mostly unhappy) stuff of everyday adult life. Indeed, most of Burgin's storytellers are men who, whatever else they're doing, are also trying to negotiate some uncomfortable response to women, to smooth-talk them into bed, or "conquer" them by getting their attention in some other way.
