Strange occurrences bedevil small-town America in Disruptions, a satisfyingly bizarre story collection from Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Millhauser (Voices in the Night). Some of these 18 pieces stick to the everyday, such as "One Summer Night," in which a 16-year-old visits his girlfriend's house, only to have her mother, a "suburban housewife... drinking alone in her Connecticut living room," pat the sofa and say, "Tell me your deepest secrets." But then there's "After the Beheading," in which residents debate what to do about a "wave of break-ins and robberies" and settle upon a throwback: public executions, with the guilty party's head lopped off by guillotine in the middle of the town green.
That's the tenor of most of these pieces. In the wonderfully creepy "Guided Tour," a company that offers "an authentic experience of historical events" takes tourists on a journey that replicates all too closely the one by the revenge-hungry Pied Piper of Hamelin. In "The Little People," a subgroup of a town's population has a unique characteristic: they're two inches tall. And the magnificent "Kafka in High School, 1959" puts teenage Kafka in midcentury America, where he drinks cherry Cokes and struggles through adolescence. A couple of stories feel gimmicky, but most of Disruptions is an innovative thrill highlighted by inspired humor, as when, in "After the Beheading," folding chairs from a church are brought to the town green to help the overflow crowd "see the victim's head clearly." These are macabre tales from one of America's best authors. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer