Review: The View From the Seventh Layer

Kevin Brockmeier is one of those writers that I love and hate to read at the same time, his stories are amazing trips into the bizarre, the melancholy and the magical, thus the love and also the hate, because every time I finish a Brockmeier story I realize how far my own writing still has to go. So I suppose hate could be changed out with any number of other words and the meaning might stay the same: mesmerized, impressed, mind blown, dumbfounded, etc.

That all said, I recently had the chance to sit down with Brockmeier's latest, a collection titled The View From the Seventh Layer. And in the thin volume the writer hits the reader with story after story of simple, elegant fiction. And then turns everything on its ear in the middle of the book with a choose your own unfortunate adventure style story that while interesting, felt off (in that I had to know where all the paths led and what mysteries waited on each journey) and led into a story or two that while quite good were a bit flat compared the first half of the book, before Brockmeier again pulls the rug out from under the reader slowly, leaving one to watch him do it yet do nothing to stop him as he throws jab after jab of story goodness, peaking with "Andrea is Changing Her Name" and finally closing out with the pitch perfect "A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets."

In short, Brockmeier doesn't disappoint.