Leni Zumas

It's a rare writer who can bring us closer to people we might cross the street to avoid.
Zumas gives socially awkward, mysteriously gifted and self-destructive outcasts spellbinding, unflinching voice in her debut collection. The heroes in this collection are trapped; some are resigned to years of caregiving, many are institutionalized and nearly all haunt the fringes of normalcy (or disregard the normal altogether). Each story begins with a lightning strike into a new consciousness: the first flashes of a romance over the lunch line in a psych ward in “Waste No Time if This Method Fails”; a teenager in the title story dreaming of abandoning his blind parents; the young woman of “The Everything Hater” living in sustained dread after her brother’s repeated suicide attempts. There are triumphs, too: a patient in treatment for an eating disorder exacts revenge on a bully, and an underage groupie liberates herself from her punk lover’s fabricated fairy tale world. Zumas captures halfway-house heartbreak as well as moments of thoughtful, scab-picking solitude. It’s a powerful, irresistible collection.
Almost no one does the right thing—or, at least, the expected thing—in these stories. You may find them funny (there's just enough humor to keep them upbeat of Carson McCullers), but there's also a very good chance they will unzip you, unsettle you. The language is medieval: part incantation, part Rikki Ducornet. “We were not like the fairy tale, as hard as he'd tried to make it so,” thinks a character in “Thieves and Mapmakers.” In fact, it is the effort to connect across enormous emotional and intellectual divides that makes these stories recognizable as stories—more fiction than parable. “I was stretched on a towel in the backyard, fourteen and no friends,” muses a character in “Dragons May Be the Way Forward,” “when I first read ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.’ When the page said, ‘And spiders spread ghosts of suns between branches,’ a nerve I'd never felt before throbbed between my legs.” Leni Zumas writes like that. Synapses snap, crackle and pop while you're reading this strange collection.