Onion Songs

Onion Songs is a collection of 42 short stories spanning the writing career of Steve Rasnic Tem, with an emphasis on the bizarre, the off-beat and the meditative. Here Tem confronts the big questions of human experience (ageing, death, identity, relationships) like a collector digging deep in the clutter of an attic and pulling out only the most unexpected and most telling finds.

His style tersely poetic, Tem is able to give fine reproductions of the texture of everyday life while writing with all the invention of unrestrained nightmare. The mindscapes contained here, where circus clowns cling to meaningless office jobs, skeletons fall like snow, ‘true unicorns’ rummage in garbage piles, and fires are liable to break out at any moment, first engage us deeply where things ache most, then compel us to keep reading with a beauty that, for all its strangeness, we finally recognise as human.

Contents

1 Onion Song

2 The Sadness

3 The Messenger

4 The Hijacker

5 Out Late In the Park

6 Picnic

7 Doodles

8 Strands

9 Night: the Endless Snowfall

10 Archetype

11 The Hunter Home from the Hill

12 Shoplifter

13 Brain of Shadows

14 Attached

15 The Rifleman, the Cancerous Cow, and the Swedish Memorial Hospital

16 Jungle J.D.

17 Cats, Dogs, & Other Creatures

18 How to Survive a Fire at the Greenmark

19 Minimalist Biography

20 Sometimes I Get Lost

21 The Changing Room

22 Charles

23 The Figure in Motion

24 The Glare and the Glow

25 Slapstick

26 Strangeness

27 Off the Map

28 Unknown

29 Saturday Afternoon

30 A Visit Home

31 The Multiples of Sorrow

32 Fish

33 Merry-Go-Round

34 The Green Dog

35 A Dream of the Dead

36 Saturday

37 Aphastic World Syndrome

38 December

39 The Mask Child

40 Shuffle

41 12 Minutes of Darkness

42 An Ending