NEON STEEL

These linked stories are valentines to Black culture, Blerds (Black nerds), and Pittsburgh.

Adrienne is a nerd. She loves anime, manga, cosplay, and cons. She’s proud to own the label but recognizes that it made her an outcast in high school, especially since she’s a rare type in the mostly white suburbs of Pittsburgh—a Blerd. It isn’t until college, when she meets Benedict, a Black otaku—a Japanese word describing someone obsessed with various types of pop culture, often video games or anime—that she realizes she isn’t alone. McCauley’s playful collection bills its stories as “episodes”—including commercial breaks and OAVs (original animation videos, or special episodes released direct to video). Like anime, these stories are sometimes wildly fantastical, with robot assassins disguised as humans (“Neon Steel”) or vampires (“The Vampires of Pittsburgh”); and sometimes seemingly realistic until a character gets enraged and shoots a fireball from his hands (“Afro Otaku”). Many of the plots borrow elements from Chinese or Korean dramas, as when Adrienne and one of her roommates pretend to date to get revenge on a third roommate (“Smoke Break”). “Isn’t this the plot to some C-drama we watched last week?” Adrienne asks her roommate, flagging the trope for readers. McCauley is deeply interested in the intersections of Black and Asian culture, and it’s delightful to see a collection explore this under-illuminated space. The juxtaposition of literary fiction with the over-the-top anime-style plotting can make for strange and interesting bedfellows. But despite the stories’ humor and the collection’s conceptual inventiveness, many of the stories don’t add up to much beyond homage, and Adrienne’s character doesn’t deepen past her pop-culture interests.

A fun homage to anime.