I AM THE GHOST HERE

A debut collection that juxtaposes reality TV and climate change, social media algorithms and illness.

Samek’s stories often begin with assertions that place her firmly in the territory of magical realism. “At thirty-six I turn into a scrambled egg,” explains the narrator of “Egg Mother,” who becomes mushy from the demands of new motherhood and unresolved grief over the death of her own mother when she was a teenager. “It is not until my older brother is thirty-three that I learn he’s controlled by a puppeteer,” begins the title story, as the narrator realizes her brother’s confidence and masculinity depend on another person pulling the strings. In magical realist stories, metaphors become real aspects of the narrative as a vehicle for exploring slippery ideas and emotions, and thus Jeff’s puppeteer makes visible the toll of assimilation on children of immigrants. Other pieces tilt toward absurdity, skewering people’s willingness to trade their privacy for fame or turn their pain into profit. In “Sven,” for example, a woman finds an earpiece on a park bench and agrees to star in a reality TV show that warps her life, while in “The Sharpest Knife,” the narrator becomes an influencer after she falls ill during a pandemic and makes a name for herself by exercising while carrying her heart around in a canning jar. Though a few stories are flattened by being too much in service to ideas at the expense of character development, over the course of the collection, Samek slyly erodes our sense of what’s real and what’s not to reveal the cost to humanity when we offer our lives up for entertainment, allow algorithms to shape our desires, and consume so ravenously that our whole world, including our own bodies, are being polluted by plastic.

Smart, dryly witty stories as absurd as they are devastating about life in the 21st century.