Mark Jude Poirier
Malinda McCollum does sinister like no one since Robert Stone. Her stories are... populated with hopeless and hapless characters who are both compelling and surprisingly loveable. The Surprising Place will leave you stunned.
Amber Dermont
Malinda McCollum's The Surprising Place -- a debut collection of vibrant and incendiary short stories -- is the book I have most longed to read. Malinda McCollum is the rightful, wakeful heir to Denis Johnson's Mid-Western Fever Dream. Her searing stories sweep over the hallowed heartland and take us deep inside the Unitarian meth labs, the bankrupted banks, the gutted starter homes that make the middle of America a great wonderland of middle-class misadventure. The Surprising Place is a daring and harrowing triumph that establishes Malinda McCollum as one of our finest short story writers. I am in awe of her talent and grace.
Doug Dorst
The Surprising Place is hands-down the most arresting and incisive story collection I've read in years. Malinda McCollum's characters fascinate, charm, and confound as they stride clear-eyed into self-destruction, seeking grace or something like it in a midwest littered with frustrated ambitions and bad decisions. Her ability to lay bare the inner worlds of these wounded people empathetically and unsentimentally is astonishing, and she writes with precision, power, and deadpan ferocity. Sentences crackle and bash; every line of dialogue is a shiv. Fiercely original, wise, funny, and deeply unsettling -- short stories don't get any better than this.
Adam Johnson
Oracular in vision, harrowing by nature, these gripping stories survey the bleak status of the American heartland: scoured by drugs, hollowed of hope, yet somehow still brimming with humanity. To read a single page of The Surprising Place is to be forever caught in the Hawk's beak of her work. Engrossing and enthralling, these are stories that make you crack the spine.
Edie Meidav
Malinda McCollum's linked short stories work like small bombs in the consciousness. She understands American optimism enough to turn it on its head, creating scenes with darkness enough to make Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor proud. Her understanding of the anti-heroine burns across a landscape McCollum knows well. Come prepared. You may find stories such as 'The Fifth Wall' as unforgettable as any by Denis Johnson or Christine Schutt. While the degradation arrives quick and dirty, its question lingers: How much can the pursuit of happiness vacate a person?
Julie Orringer
Malinda McCollum's stories are brilliantly cut from the hardest stuff, each one a perfect sharp-edged prism flashing insight from its depths.With an unflinching eye toward her characters' fractured lives, she teases out their vulnerability and their humanity, linking them irrevocably to us all.I have the wildest admiration for this writer, whose debut collection announces her as a storyteller of the first order.Everyone must read this daring and inimitable book.
