The Miniature Wife and Other Stories

In each of his stories, Gonzales establishes a fantastic premise and follows it through to what he is able to make seem to be its inevitable conclusion. A man who is in the miniaturization industry accidentally (?) reduces his wife to the size of a coffee cup. He does what he can to make her happy, or is his real interest all along in controlling her. Things don't go well and she rebels. A highjacked airplane circles Dallas for twenty years. In "The Sounds of Early Morning," sounds can kill. At a time when entire continents are sinking into the ocean, life goes on.

The stories are most often both melancholic and funny, usually told as first person narratives in the voice of a young man trying to both make sense of and make do in his given situation. Of the stories that fail for me, one involves living inside a video game, in another the protagonist's experience of a zombie apocalypse is defined by tropes he knows from movies of the same. A werewolf story has the same sort of self -consciousness about it.

But Gonzales hits few false notes in the thoroughly enjoyable first collection.