Short Stuff: Daniel Grandbois’ “Unlucky Lucky Days”

By Jenny Shank, 6-30-08

Unlucky Lucky Days
By Daniel Grandbois
BOA Editions
122, $14

On his website, Colorado fiction writer Daniel Grandbois describes his first book, Unlucky Lucky Days, as a “collection of nonsense and absurdist tales” so I guess I should have known better than to go seeking the real-life inspiration for one story, “Mansion,” about a turtle who is “an executioner in retirement” and becomes stuck in a mansion he was trying to execute (if that make sense, you’ve got a more agile mind than I do).  Grandbois writes that a librarian decided to take the mansion as a paperweight, and “that’s where you can find the executioner right down to this day—in the fish tank near the children’s books at the Boulder Public Library.”

It sounds like a story a parent would make up for a child who asked about a little house in the bottom of a fish tank, but when I went to the library to check out that tank, I found not a mansion, but a sunken ship inside it.  I couldn’t tell if a turtle was hiding in there.  Grandbois book is packed with puzzlers like “Mansion,” stories only a paragraph or a few pages long, most of them following the meandering logic of a make-believe tale invented on the fly, in which the author gives sentient life to objects or creatures, such as a stain on a cement floor ("The Stain"), a centipede ("The Centipede"), and a head of broccoli ("Broccoli").

At times there are hints of menace in these stories—such as that “executioner” in “Mansion,” or a bunch of dead bears in “Croquet,” but they never get too dark, unlike one of my all-time favorite flash fiction collections, Jim Crace’s “The Devil’s Larder,” in which he wrote of food motivating lust, envy, murder, and greed.

Grandbois is also a musician who has participated in several of Denver’s most accomplished and idiosyncratic bands—Tarantella, Munly, and Slim Cessna’s Auto Club.  (Jay Munly, a member of Slim Cessna and frontman of his own outfit, has also published short stories.) These groups all like to tell quirky tales through their songs, and at times some of Grandbois’ stories missed for me because they had that cryptic quality of song lyrics without the sustaining force of music behind them.  Grandbois doesn’t always evince the knack that flash fiction master Lydia Davis demonstrates for achieving depth through nonsense, such as “Passing Wind,” a story in her most recent collection Varieties of Disturbance that featured the narrator’s inner monologue on the occasion of her dog’s fart in front of a guest (or was the guest the culprit?) that somehow offered a keen take on social relations and the way the human mind works. 

But others of Grandbois’ 73 stories hit right home with an insight or a joke as sharp as those of Davis (who offers book-jacket praise on Unlucky Lucky Days).  For example, in “The Growth,” which begins, “They toasted good health without looking at the growth on Aunt Mary,” the growth itself takes over the story with the force of life, fantasizing about sprouting hands and escaping.  Surely the growth looms this large in the minds of all at the table (especially the kids) who must avoid looking at it. 

“The Log” tells the story of a human face on a log, carved by a chimp.  “He’d meant to carve his own face,” Grandbois writes, “but his use of tools was limited.” And in “Toothpaste,” the unnamed housemate of a man named Carl discovers Carl’s teeth in the dryer, and finds him replacing his teeth with pliers, complaining, “We’re out of toothpaste!” The perfect passive-aggression of Carl’s act and his accusatory tone about the toothpaste will remind readers of their own cohabitation situations gone sour.

It doesn’t seem as though Grandbois minds if some of his stories leave the reader scratching his head; he builds in the very critique some might make of his writing in the lead-off tale, “The Yarn,” which ends with a spider commenting, “Leaves one unsatisfied.  The ending was too abrupt.”

Daniel Grandbois will read from his book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 8. Munly and the Lepercalians will also perform.