Perone (author of Danger Peak) collects six prankish, horrific stories/provocations that feature TV, ghosts, and characters pushed past their breaking points in a world gone mad. Mostly written when he was in high school in the 1990s, when that world was only heading toward madness, the stories have the over-the-top energy of adolescence, as things quickly get extreme for the protagonists. A smirking satiric impulse powers some entries, reflecting the perspective of a young person (rightly) outraged about the way things are going. That's certainly true for the title story, in which small-town teen Teddy is jolted by the TV obsession all around him. (His mother demands he kiss the screen.) Teddy's doom is telegraphed from the start, but the glee that Perone takes—imagining townsfolk with screens strapped to their heads, his mother's self-mutilation, and more—sets it apart.

"How To Save A Drowning Butterfly" centers on a young man of apparently reduced mental capacity who endures constant abuse. Through a series of pointedly extreme coincidences and bad decisions, he's framed for murder, sent to prison, and abused, with Perone playing his misfortune largely for laughs, like some sort of grotesque comedy of errors. The inventive "Paper Language" finds a writer inspired by a cursed ream of paper, while in "Investigating the Future's End,” the most complex story in the collection, a future cop/reporter realizes that an apocalyptic cult is haunting him with his past cruelties and causing increasingly widespread damage. The identity of the cult's messianic leader is a grisly surprise.

As readers might expect of a smart, media-saturated young writer from an era that prized extremity of expression, the collection at times has a vicious edge, indulging in adolescent power fantasy and exploring revenge, cruelty, and misery. But the closing story, perhaps inevitably titled "School Spirit," surprises with a small note of hope—even redemption—in an otherwise bleak and snarky collection of horror stories that revel in Doom Generation nihilism.

Takeaway: Grisly, satiric 1990s horror stories of young men in a world going mad.

Comparable Titles: Rebecca Rowland’s Generation X-Ed, Adiran Ludens’s The Tension of a Coming Storm.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B
Marketing copy: A