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UNDERWORLD DREAMS by Daniel Braum

UNDERWORLD DREAMS

by Daniel Braum

Pub Date: Sept. 13th, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59021-583-8
Publisher: Lethe Press

Braum’s third collection of short stories offers tales of magical realism.

The characters in these stories have relatable desires, but they have supernatural forces working against them, often in the periphery. In “The Monkey Coat,” June has had bad luck since David, the father of their daughter, Ivy, left unexpectedly. Her fortunes get worse when she finds a family heirloom in a storage shed: a coat made of monkey’s fur. After she starts wearing it, her relationships with others take a bad turn and she eventually goes missing—leaving the coat, and perhaps a curse, for Ivy. In “Rebbe Yetse’s Shadow,” a young man trying to straighten out his life faces a choice offered by two ghosts. In “Cloudland Earthbound,” a man battles the government and other mysterious powers as he tries to preserve a nightclub in Brisbane, Australia. In the opener, “How To Stay Afloat When Drowning,” a man looking for direction becomes intrigued by a woman who may actually be a sea creature. The premises are creative, with the characters usually facing strange choices in unusual circumstances. However, they often feel as if there’s something missing. In “Between Our Earth and Their Moon,” for instance, a big source of tension is a man named Grant Donovan, who’s supposed to be the heavy of the piece, but readers never get a clear sense of what’s motivating his actions. Similarly, Nate, the narrator of the story, is driven by a previous relationship with someone named Alexandra, but the story never reveals enough about her to make that relationship important to the readers. There are also frequent scenes in which the setting isn’t firmly established before the action starts, as in “Tommy’s Shadow,” when Marco and his friend Richie talk about taking a fateful trip to an asylum. The conversation prods Marco to get into his car, but it makes for an awkward scene because readers don’t know where the characters were when they started.

A wonderfully imaginative but undercooked set of tales that falls short of its potential.