Dangerous Laughter - Thirteen Stories

Rating All Ages Genre sci-fi Publisher Knopf External Links Official Dangerous Laughter Website

As a fan of the short story form, I was eager for the opportunity to read an author I'd never heard of before. It turns out Steven Millhauser is the author of the story that became the film The Illusionist, so in a way I was familiar with a piece of his work. But Millhauser's written work achieves something that no film can: beautiful written language. Millhauser is a writer of high degree, and he definitely knows his way around a sentence.

There are thirteen stories included in this volume, and they cover a wide range of concepts. Some of them lean toward science fiction; others flirt with the ghost story genre. But they don't often fall into the realm of the impossible, which is something I found myself almost wishing for. A few stories contain events that seem impossible or fanciful, when really there is probably a rational explanation. This is fine, of course, but I kept wanting more. I wanted to be surprised, not by a twist back into the reasonable, but by a deeper dive into the imaginary.

But that is a small complaint for what is an excellent compilation of stories. Millhauser forces me to adjust my definition of "story" in some cases, as many of the entries in this book read more like grand ideas -- some don't even have characters (at least none that are named. He gives us glimpses of other, imaginary worlds, like in "The Dome," a story about a future society that begins to build domes over houses, then cities, and finally the entire nation. Or, in "The Other Town," where the citizens know that, just on the other side of the woods, there is a town identical to theirs, where groups of workers called Replicators go to great lengths to ensure that any change in the original town is reflected there -- all this so citizens can, in effect, spy on their neighbors' affairs, go through their closets, and basically break down all barriers of real privacy.

My favorite of the thirteen is "The Room in the Attic," a story of a high school boy who visits a mysterious girl in a pitch black room. We are continually jerked around, first into believing that the girl isn't real at all, then into believing she is, and back and forth and back and forth. It's a riveting read, and the conclusion took me by surprise.

It's not difficult to recommend Dangerous Laughter to lovers of short stories. Millhauser is a literary writer, to be sure, so fans that exclusively enjoy "popcorn" genre fiction might not want to pick it up. But if you're curious, if you're looking for a quick read (divided into thirteen even quicker reads) that has some substance to it, give it a shot.