It’s a book filled with unlikely—at times
indescribable—occurrences: A talking cat plots to kill his
adopted caretaker’s wife. A female peeping tom witnesses her teenage
neighbor gradually transform from a boy to a girl. A fictionalized
Lenny Bruce has sex with a bum, and then injects his own ejaculate back
into his body with a mammoth syringe.
Creamy Bullets, the new collection of short stories by Future
Tense publisher and occasional Mercury contributor Kevin
Sampsell, pairs bizarre eroticism with Raymond Carver minimalism;
flights of fancy are described in terse, matter-of-fact tones, and the
grim sobriety of the real world is undermined by the unreliable
perceptions of its inhabitants. Some of the stories are merely head
scratching, particularly the brief, surreal snapshots in the book’s
opening third, subtitled “Small,” most of which are less than a page
long. However, Sampsell’s fertile imagination is given room to stretch
out in the “Medium” and “Large” sections, for stories that are strange,
funny, and brimming with humanity. The reader frequently and happily
loses footing when banal events turn into flat-out dreamscapes, and
Sampsell manages to do this without needlessly amping the volume of his
calm, unadorned prose.
It’s not all weird: Some of the collection’s best stories are
relatively clear headed, including “Reunion,” in which the narrator
finds himself at a family gathering surrounded by relatives he scarcely
knows, except for his wheelchair-bound father, whom he dreams of
pushing into the river. But Bullets is at its most memorable in
stories like “Bubbles,” which is nearly poetic in its sparseness: “She
chews slowly, her lovely lips curling, her jaw moving in a smooth
little dance. Her bubble comes out confidently, without fear. It grows
bigger like a puff of smoke.” Sampsell crafts his stories in much the
same way: sweetly, almost frivolously, expanding breath by breath,
always assuredly maintaining the delicate balance between a perfectly
rounded world in miniature and a loud, messy pop.
And, of course, Sampsell can’t resist a deliciously odd erotic
finish to the scene: “She stares into my eyes. ‘What next?’ I ask her.
‘Bubble fight,’ she says. We stand close without touching and press our
gum together.”