Review: "The Dead Fish Museum" by Charles D'Ambrosio

As far as short stories go, I prefer ones that pack the elements of a novel tightly but neatly into twenty or thirty pages. This is why I think horror short stories such as “Pop Art” and “Night They Missed the Horror Show” are among the best short stories to come along in the past quarter century. But I do not mind a short story that is unique but not like a short novel, like “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”, which combines both, but has an originality that is unmatched. But I really do not like a boring short story, where nothing really happens and you are thanking yourself that this is just a short story, because this what you are reading would be unreadable if it exceeded the 200 page mark. You can write stories about the mundane and do it well, but it cannot be mundane. The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D’Ambrosio straddles that fine line between good and bad short story, but rarely falls toward the unsavory side. While hinted at in one, all of these stories are about real people living desperate lives, seeking out light and comfort in any place they can, even in unsavory places, like the set of a porno movie or the boring life of fixing old typewriters. They offer a way out, but really not much of a way out. As far as the quality of this collection, it is pretty decent, with the title story, which takes place in the aforementioned porno movie set, and “Screenwriter” which takes place in a psych ward and has a very awkward sex scene involving a cigarette. Some are kind of dull, like “The Bone Game”, which has too much information of fishing, at least for me, but this is an overall fine set of stories for the short story fan.

Rating: 4/5