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People Who Disappear
by Alex Leslie
Not to sound like I'm channeling Forrest Gump, but I've always thought of short story collections as being like a box of chocolates. There are some stories that you really enjoy and you hope the next one tastes as good. Then there are some that after a page or two you feel like you've bitten into that one with the orange goo inside (what is that stuff anyway?).
And then there's People Who Disappear. Alex Leslie's short story debut is like opening the chocolate box with your eyes closed and discovering that every piece you put in your mouth is a truffle.
The twelves stories all deal with relationships: with friends, family, lovers, strangers, society, ourselves. At first it is easy to think that the people being presented here are other people, people whose lives are nothing like our own, but Leslie presents these narratives in such a way that we soon come to recognize in the characters something of ourselves or of people we know. There are secrets here, and people who feel they don't belong, and while the exact situations may not repeat themselves in our personal histories (my childhood friends and I never uncovered and collected dead bodies, as do the kids in "Face"), the emotional situations are universal.
The settings range from urban Vancouver to the Wild Coast of Vancouver Island, from make-shift encampments in the treetops of BC forests to a story told through the lens of the Internet. They're all variations of wilderness, though, that Leslie guides us through.
Buy a friend a box of chocolates, wrapped in Alex Leslie's exquisite language and imagery. Tell them to indulge.
