“Christopher Merkner wastes no time establishing the odd atmosphere that pervades this debut collection. . . . The longer [stories] show what Mr. Merkner can do when he marries his absurd plots and unnerving deadpan tone to genuine emotional concerns.”
—The New York Times
“The 17 stories here are wondrous strange. Husbands and wives, parents and children, they all come together in surreal and dreamlike ways. . . . Profound and terrifically fun.”
—The Star Tribune
“The true beauty of these tales lies in their delicate endings, which manage to both tie up loose ends and leave everything hanging, so that they are simultaneously satisfying and mysterious. Such complexity makes great reading for lovers of short fiction, and for all who wish to witness a new master at work.”
—Booklist
“The premises are wild and strange; the writing is full of dark humor.”
—The Missouri Review
“Both chilling and funny too, and oft-uncomfortable for people familiar with the settings. Merkner is really good at melding his observations with his imaginations into something hugely entertaining.”
—The Detroit Metro Times
“Merkner’s sentences are crisp and cruel. . . . As a whole, the book resembles the movie Fargo with its heart fed through the wood chipper, leaving a work that is often possessed of cold, uncompromising beauty.”
—KGB Bar Lit Magazine
“The stories . . . are formally playful in their interrogation of Midwestern privilege and parental prerogatives, each rendering the familiar strange again so that we might see it anew.”
—The Brooklyn Rail
“Sharing the seemingly ordinary setting of the Midwest, these short stories turn simple and normal into weird, melancholy, and wonderful. . . . they all exhibit the author’s ability to keep his work in the realm of plausibility.”
—ForeWord Reviews
“Merkner isn’t afraid to look into dark spaces and expose painfully honest truths.”
—Bookslut
“These earnest and darkly surreal vignettes hold a magnifying glass over Midwestern suburbia.”
—Modern Midwest
“Christopher Merkner is the happiest, most disturbed—certainly the most happily disturbed—writer I know.”
—Padgett Powell
“The Grant Wood of short fiction. Rare are writers with the gift to mash up domestic and gothic in ways uncanny and heartbreaking, and Merkner’s one of the gifted.”
—Josh Russell
“Christopher Merkner’s chillingly funny stories are a substantial reminder that the two weirdest and most disturbing places in the galaxy are the mind and the home.”
—Chris Bachelder
“These brilliant stories lay bear our greatest follies with a precision that leaves the reader humbled and breathless: here we have a must-read indictment of moral defect that could not be more saturated with importance and entertainment.”
—Alissa Nutting
“The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic is wild, it is wonderful, it is animated by its author’s unfailingly expansive treatment of his restless, covetous, striving, limited, dangerous, endearing characters.”
—Brock Clarke
