TED'S TALES THREE

Delgrosso’s third collection of short-short stories offers slice-of-life vignettes and more fantastical SF and paranormal yarns.

“Time Skip” is one of the lengthier tales in the collection, although it’s not long at all; in it, a family-man narrator vanishes for two years, but for him, no time has passed at all. Hypnosis reveals that it’s the doing of bizarre-looking aliens: “something between an octopus and a turtle, a dense, shell-like cover over something softer that was held up by a bunch of tentacles rather than legs.” What their actions might mean for humanity’s future is an unanswered question. In “Cured,” a narrator with a rare blood type is the subject of a future, experimental plague treatment from helpful extraterrestrials with unforeseen side effects. In “Treestones,” a virtuous young pioneer-settler couple in the 1880s do a good turn to a Kiowa shaman, who rewards them with practically eternal life. However, the couple must deal with the fallout of remaining conspicuously unchanged. The more earthbound stories include “The Bread Problem,” in which a young Italian American proudly takes charge of the family bread-baking business but resorts to extreme measures when faced with a mob shakedown. A similar gangland background appears in “Funny You Should Ask,” in which a former wise guy thinks, mistakenly, that he’s gotten out of the syndicate without repercussions. The narrator of “From Head to Toe,” meanwhile, escapes dire peril on a wilderness hike but is exhilarated, not traumatized, by the experience. “Making a Difference” follows the routine of a military sniper who’s recruited for the war on drugs.

Not all the tales feature such deadly dramatics; the protagonist of “Wound Up,” for instance, gains self-confidence by being thrust into the unplanned role of opening for a rock band who’s late in setting up. The author calls his oeuvre “books to read before bed for grownups” though not in the bawdy sense, but rather in the notion of uncomplicated, nongraphic, plainspoken narratives that wrap up in a minimum of pages. A few of the pieces, such as “Test Day” and “Red Hot,” intriguingly have the mien of the story genre known as the conte cruel, in which nasty conclusions await main characters who don’t really seem to deserve such terrible fates. However, most of these stories in this collection don’t seem to aspire to O. Henry-style head-spinning twists; indeed, many of them bring down the curtain as early as possible, at the point at which the reader realizes what the plot is. In the stories in the horror/SF/fantasy vein, Delgrosso most recalls an unsung and prolific short-story master of yesteryear: William Sambrot, who was anthologized only once, in 1963’s Island of Fear and Other Science Fiction Stories, but is worth seeking out. Other works feel like flash fiction—workshop-developed, bite-sized pieces—and they generally come across as the types of tale that used to fill up fiction pages when popular family magazines like The Saturday Evening Post were newsstand mainstays.

A multigenre sampler of brisk, inoffensive tales of a kind that may inspire nostalgia.