Book Review: Boxcutters by John Chrostek

Reviewed by Nick Gardner

John Chrostek’s stories hop the fence to the bizarre side while still rooting themselves deep within the heart in his debut story collection, Boxcutters.

Each of the 13 stories in this collection is distinct. While “Finding the Joy” plays with present day realism, featuring an Amazon package thief, “Jesus Christ, Human Relations,” (a title worth a laugh and a ponder in itself) bumps into the miraculous, the supernatural. And “Vice and Virtue” is set in a freely fictionalized B.C. Greece and features mythical creatures alongside ageless themes of love, courage, and generally just figuring out who you are. Chrostek’s characters are also varied: Artists, office workers, the aforementioned thief. All have deep lives, dense clouds of confusion to fight through.

“Finding the Joy” is a firecracker of a lead into Chrostek’s collection. A hint of denial plays around in the prose, a sense that the criminal still believes himself to be right. The first line, “Let the record show I lived in that neighborhood for seven years before I committed a crime,” carries an excuse and an admission of guilt. The narrator is immediately complex to the point where it’s impossible to not read on and figure out what makes him tick.

And the successive stories, though often not quite as fast-moving or as punchy, still follow this theme of complex and perfectly revealed characterization. Even when that character is an angel or a washed-up actress locked in on her fame-based obsession, each character is one-hundred-percent themself.

And just as the characters are complex and diverse, the prose varies slightly from story to story as well. While “Finding the Joy” (a personal favorite) begins with such direct and succinct prose, “The Conduit of All Things” takes a slower pace with more robust paragraphs. The first line, “Dawn simmered on the cool flat air in Saddle River,” doesn’t relay a breakneck story. It plods. It ponders. But that pace portrays the mood. By the time Richard Nixon returns home in time for breakfast, it becomes evident that the pace fits the content, the character, the hilarious-yet-somehow-still-deep meaning of the story.

Because of the varied nature of Chrostek’s stories, it seems important to issue a warning: Read in rapid succession, the stories in Boxcutters could cause mental whiplash. In a world of tightly-woven and linked story collections, Chrostek doesn’t offer the reader an easy merge between times, places, or people, but overall themes do emerge. Many characters feel trapped. Whether it be by societal norms or a literal glass cage, they are imprisoned in lives that aren’t necessarily the lives they want to live. And just like with all trapped things, it’s beautiful to see their full potential, their entire freedom, once they’ve been set free.

Thank you for reading Nick Gardner’s book review of Boxcutters by John Chrostek! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

The post Book Review: Boxcutters by John Chrostek appeared first on Independent Book Review.