I WANT TO SHOW YOU MORE

A debut collection of short stories by Quatro that's more confusing than profound.

A married woman tells her mother about her phone-sex relationship with another man; the same woman returns home with her husband to find her dead lover in their bed and watches as her husband lies down beside him; a grueling race is held in which each entrant must carry a metal statue with an erect penis; a woman dying of melanoma struggles to survive, and her husband wrestles with his conscience; an old woman, determined to mail a letter to the president, embarks on a final journey to the post office; the married woman winds up having phone sex and ignores her children; a young girl, embarrassed by her quadriplegic mother, is forced by her grandmother to go to a pool party; other stories center around a deaf man who becomes a cult leader and a young man who has a sinkhole. Quatro’s stories range from the ridiculously strange to the seemingly normal, but there’s certainly nothing ordinary about this darkly themed, graphically sexual book. The stories, set in the area surrounding Lookout Mountain, Ga., rip apart the moral, familial and religious conventions of modern society. Nothing is sacred to the author, who possesses a prolific imagination but fails to connect with the average reader. The stories are interwoven in a manner that makes it extremely challenging for the reader to link the events and the characters, and the writing is often stilted and difficult to follow, at best. Readers who appreciate avant-garde prose and odd humor may find the stories appealing, but the author’s meandering style and strange content will prove too unconventional for others.  

Bizarre.