Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories
Written by Kevin Wilson
Narrated by George Newbern, Karen White, Michael Crouch and
4/5
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About this audiobook
A debut short story collection in the tradition of writers like Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders—strange, imaginative, and refreshingly original—now on audio as part of Ecco’s “Art of the Story” Series, and with a new introduction from the author.
Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. “Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in “Blowing Up On the Spot,” a story singled out by Ann Patchett for Ploughshares, a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.
Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.
Kevin Wilson
KEVIN WILSON is Vice President of Videologies, Inc., a company that specializes in training administrative professionals in Fortune 500 companies. JENNIFER WAUSON is President of Videologies, Inc.
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Reviews for Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
141 ratings13 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Now that I've decided to try to 'review' each book that I have cataloged, there will be books( like this one) where I may recall reading it some years ago, may or may not remember how or why I liked it, but still can recall only a few or maybe no details about the experience.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I'll be honest - the title and cover art grabbed my attention for this book, but I'm so glad it happened that way. These are some of the best, most innovative and interesting short stories I've ever read. The first story pulled me in and each of the following were just as fascinating. Wilson writes in a world where there is a company of stand-in grandmothers for families who aren't ready to tell their children that granny has passed on, where letters must be manually sorted in a Scrabble factory, where a museum of whatnot is a setting for love. Another book I'll be recommending to everyone.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I’ve been on a bit of a Kevin Wilson jag in the last few months, with a novel and a couple of short story collections. He has joined a swelling bag of my go-to writers—'bag’ being a vague term meant to hold many of my very favorite authors who I’ve collected over my lifetime of reading … the brightest, juiciest berries on the bush. I have a firm belief in Wilson’s work. He is simply and seemingly inexhaustibly inventive, fluid, funny, amazing, strange, and talented. I won’t be picking out his best story in the collection, or even my five favorites, just take it on faith, this is a strong and confident writer showing readers just what he can do.Just a note on the book’s structure. In the back of the book there’s a short biography, a question-and-answer section, and a very curious section where he explains what motivated him to write which stories. I love to learn what got into a writer’s head, fermented awhile, and made the words come out. Sometimes the motivation was simple, other times more involved. How can a reader not want to know more about the creations we devour off the writer’s pages? Remember, life is simply better with Kevin.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5By way of introducing the new edition of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, a short fiction collection re-released a little more than a decade after its debut, author Kevin Wilson has a very interesting way of explaining the difference between producing novels and short stories. Writing novels, he says, is like taking a long, peaceful trip in a car you bought with a low-cost loan; you know you are headed to a nice destination, but it does not even matter if you end up somewhere other than where you intended to go in the first place. On the other hand, producing short stories, for him at least, is like stealing the car, driving it really fast, knowingly crashing the car into a tree, and then crawling out of the wreckage to do it over again.The 11 “car crashes” comprising this volume are all entertaining and thought-provoking examples of just what that metaphor implies about the creative process. Ranging in emotional impact from spectacular, fiery events (“Grand Stand-In”, “Blowing Up on the Spot”, “The Dead Sister Handbook”, “Museum of Whatnot”) to multi-vehicle pile-ups (“Birds in the House”, “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth”, “The Shooting Man”, “Worst-Case Scenario”) to more mundane fender-benders (“Mortal Kombat”, “The Choir Director’s Affair”, “Go, Fight, Win”), each of these stories exhibits the author’s surreal and off-center imagination to great effect. They all provide humorous looks—darkly humorous, to be sure—at people slightly removed from the mainstream of life and who must deal with some extraordinary circumstances.I really enjoyed reading this collection, which was the first of Wilson’s work that I have come across. He manages to create very relatable characters (although not always likeable) with ordinary human emotions who are involved in simply bizarre situations. For instance, the protagonist in “Blowing Up on the Spot” works at a Scrabble factory sorting letter Q tiles while try to reconcile the grief over the death of his parents, who have recently spontaneously combusted on a subway train. Or, the three recent college graduates in the title story who delay moving on with their lives by spending several months digging tunnels all over (under, actually) the city from a hole their parents’ backyard. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth may well have been executed early in the author’s career, but it is a book I can recommend without hesitation to any fan of engaging, well-crafted stories.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love it. I used to hate short stories until I read this. Amazing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I picked up Tunneling to the Center of the Earth as I was wandering around at Parnassus, the only indie bookstore in Nashville, TN. Wilson's short story book, along with his novel, were laid out on the "Local Authors" table. The collection of short stories was not what I expected. In a good way.
If I were to compare, thought Wilson does not need to be compared, I would compare this collection to Etgar Keret's collections, perhaps The Girl on the Fridge. Sure, Wilson's characters are very in-the-middle-of-America-why-would-anyone-live-here, somewhat like the characters of McCullers, though fifty years later and less bound by poverty and ignorance. But the uncanny feel of the stories, the deadpan narration, the very-American-yet-strange lives did remind me of Keret. In these stories, ordinary lives are so strange that truly strange things seem rather ordinary. Lives are lived, days are spent, and nothing much happens, until it does. When it happens, it is an ultimate move from within, and just how many days have to be spent walking back and forth from the factory, counting the steps, is anyone's guess. Yet Wilson captures something in his stories that's hard to explain. A mood, a feeling of being on the brink and not knowing it, an anticipation that's part desperation and part hope (again, McCullers comes to mind here.)
Highly recommended for those who like stories about ordinary people and those who have the patience to wait for something good and precious. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I am not normally a fan of offbeat, fantastical stories, preferring fiction with realistic situations that shed insight on circumstances I might share in my own life. But Kevin Wilson, who goes back and forth between the real and surreal throughout this collection, won me over big-time. Even his often odd premises - like parents who hire professionals to pretend to be grandparents to their children - bear too close a resemblance to reality, given how many parents won't take their children to nursing homes to avoid exposing them to the harsh reality of such places. And in that story, the all too recognizable human traits - like the guilty conscience of the protagonist who serves as a surrogate grandparent -- quickly take over. When he does tell a "straight" story - like "go, fight, win" or "Mortal Kombat"- he mines some incredibly powerful and moving feelings, like isolation, detachment, and ultimately indifference to being social outcasts as the characters go about constructing their own separate, and slightly weird worlds that make more sense to them that the ordinary world they can't find a place in.
The 11 stories in the collection are:
1. Grand Stand-In - 26 pp - Great piece about a woman who works for a company that provides "surrogate" grandparents for families so they can avoid explaining to their kids when a real grandparent has died, or even more cruelly, when the "sandwich generation" couple no longer finds their parents suitable companions for their children. A very twisted world that the author gets you thoroughly engrossed in with the portrayal of a stand-in grandmother whose conscience gradually becomes plagued by the deception she helps facilitate.
2. Blowing Up On the Spot - 18 pp - Another wonderfully offbeat story. A 20-year-old guy works as a sorter in a Scrabble factory and must cope with the death of his parents, who spontaneously combusted, and his traumatized younger brother who now makes repeated suicide attempts.
3. The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide For Sensitive Boys - 11 pp - An incredibly poignant story. A boy who has lost his sister creates a guidebook, with encyclopedic entries, on how to cope with, foresee, and make sense of a sister's death.
4. Birds in the House - 17 pp - Four brothers compete for the rights to a Southern mansion after their mother dies and makes them go through a bizarre ritual of building paper birds to determine who gets the house. Told from the perspective of one of the brother's sons, who has more love for his departed grandmother than any of the warring brothers.
5. Mortal Kombat - 20 pp - Two high school AV nerds begin a sexual relationship. One has genuine romantic interest; the other succumbs to the physical connection because they're both so horribly isolated from their classmates and families. A fierce game of Mortal Kombat becomes the forum for working out the tension in their relationship.
6. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth - 12 pp - Three college graduates start digging a hole in one of their backyards. It then becomes a fantastical set of tunnels that enable them to escape the pressures and demands of a "normal" life.
7. The Shooting Man - 14 pp - A bizarre tale of a man obsessed with a circus freak show and the efforts he makes to convince his friend and girlfriend to see the star attraction - a man who shoots himself in the face.
8. The Choir Director's Affair (The Baby Teeth) - 10 pp - The friend of a philandering husband worries about the impact his friend's affair will have on the man's new baby, who has an extremely premature set of teeth.
9. Go, Fight, Win - 41 pp - An amazingly good novella about two very mixed-up kids. A lonely and shy 16-year-old girl becomes even more isolated when she moves to a new town and her mother insists the best way to make friends is to join the cheerleading squad. She goes through the motions with her team who do make an effort to include her, but she feels no sense of belonging. Her only relief comes from building model cars. (Hence the great illustration on the book's cover of the snap -away parts that come in model kits.) The only person the girl manages to connect with is the strange 12-year-old boy who is her neighbor, who goes through his own odd obsessions - recently with trying to fly, and now, more dangerously, with playing with fire.
10. The Museum of Whatnot - 21 pp - Another fascinating story, in which the weirdness of the premise provides the perfect vehicle to demonstrate the main character's emotional state. A woman who has cut herself from all meaningful connections to anything - both people and inanimate belongings - works as a curator in a museum that displays people's collections of banally routine items - like a lifetime's worth of toe-nail clippings or rubber-bands and paper clips. One visitor who keeps coming back to find meaning in his estranged father's collections of all the spoons he owned over the course of his life challenges the woman into forming a connection with something, and someone, less trivial.
11. Worst-case Scenario - 16 pp - A man whose job is to lay out the worst-case disaster scenarios for companies and people begins to deal with the consequences of his doomsday predictions when a young mother who hired him becomes crippled with fear over all the dangers her young child could fall victim to. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Oh my! What a strange, twisted, wild world Kevin Wilson creates when he sits down to write. This collection of stories, where Wilson turns the mundane into the surreal into the achingly beautiful surpassed every expectation I had for it. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years and I’m not sure what prompted me to pick it up now but am I ever glad I did.Each story is finely crafted but I’ll warn you now, it’s a weird, weird world. For instance, ”Worst-Case Scenario,” opens this way:”I work for Worst-Case Scenario, Inc. I have a degree in Catastrophe from a small college in the Northeast, where I learned all the ways that things fall apart. I am a field agent in ‘what could happen.’ I go to amusement parks and punch numbers in my computer and tell them how many people could die on a ride, what we call absolute disaster. I calculate what would happen if a city bus full of people was taken hostage and then got stuck in a freak blizzard during rush-hour traffic.”Part whimsy, part startling possibility and always told with a wink each story is shot through with humor and before you know it, Wilson cunningly convinces you that everything he’s telling you is certainly a possibility.Each story is a gem; most are stories of loneliness and isolation. In ”Grand Stand-in,”the unmarried and childless narrator relates her story as an employee of a company that supplies substitute grandparents for families that have that need. She can contract for once a week visits or even only once a month phone calls; whatever the family needs. In ”Blowing Up on the Spot,”a teenage boy is left to care for his younger brother when his parents self-combust on the subway. In ”Museum of Whatnot”, a young woman, with a degree in Museum Science is the caretaker of the Museum of Whatnot where she meets an older man who takes an unexpected interest in her. ”Tunneling to the Center of the Earth,” tells the story of three recent college graduates without prospects, who find themselves digging a tunnel in the backyard My favorite story was ”Birds in the House” where four brothers, who absolutely hate each other, are forced by the terms of their mother’s will, to spend time together making a thousand paper cranes which will be set on a table. Four fans will be set in motion by the oldest grandchild, the story’s narrator. The last crane left on the table will determine which brother inherits the ramshackle mansion. The ending left me holding my breath.There’s an interview with the author at the end of the book and he talks about the different writers who have influenced him. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and especially his story ”Sophistication,” influenced Wilson’s story ”Worst-case Scenario”. Since I just read Anderson’s book a few weeks ago I had to return to it and try to make comparisons. Wilson admired the way in which Anderson connected two lonely, isolated people and tried to do the same in his story. And he does so, beautifully. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The author of this book is quite young - possibly mid to late 20s. The characters in the stories here are all either on the verge of adulthood or are young and are being forced into a premature form of adulthood. Perhaps I would have enjoyed these stories more when I was 10 years younger and facing a similar time in my life. Or maybe I would enjoy them if I were 10 years older and had enough distance from that time in my life to not just feel utterly relieved that it's over.He has beginnings and middles of stories down but his endings are often disappointing. They seem abrupt and out of place. There is something to be said for leaving the reader wanting more. Many of these stories, however, just feel incomplete.His styles vary from story to story like he is still experimenting and searching for his voice. This is not a bad thing and the PS material at the back of the book lets him explain which authors/stories were his inspirations for each story.Wilson is a fine writer and there are a couple of stories in this collection that are outstanding. Very promising debut collection from a young writer. I look forward to reading more from him.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An utterly inspired collection of short stories, the whole package bubbling with affection, yearning, irony, sadness, character, humour; I honestly enjoyed every single one, which came as a surprise, as I usually find short story collections – especially if I’m not already familiar with the author – a bit hit and miss, or at least find some ‘filler’ material in the mix… not so with Kevin Wilson’s Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. After a while, I felt as though I were reading a complete work on a theme - unlikely people finding a way to connect with one another, or loss vs. finding that ineffable ‘something’ – but it’s the book’s shuffled deck of reality and surrealism, of the mundane and the remarkable, and that makes it so appealing. I won’t review every story, but my favourites were probably the relatively quiet ‘the museum of whatnot’ in which a young museum curator sorts and exhibits collections of the seemingly banal into displays of art while finding herself unwilling to add a single thing to her life, even the gentleman who comes to look at the spoons and stays to flirt with her, and the book’s opener ’grand stand-in’ in which a ‘granny for hire’ realises she must let go of the people who have defined her working life. Imagery and ideas from every story have stayed with me; this man has crafted a talent for the short story, I hope we see more of them, even if he moves on to novels.Incidentally I love these Harper Perennial soft paperback editions, with the false ‘dust jacket’ flaps, and spines that are malleable in a way that doesn’t crease, and pleasant rough-guillotined front edge - made it a pleasure to read in every sense.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Franz Kafka, Michael Chabon, and the literature of the fantastic seem to be major influences on Kevin Wilson, whose collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, will delight anyone who enjoys off-balance and well-told tales. Kafka’s influence is evident in the surreal situations Wilson creates: in one story, three young people who have just graduated from college but don’t have jobs decide to live underground for a time, and begin digging in their parents’ suburban yard; in another, a man has a job finding the Q’s in a Scrabble tile factory that rains letters down on him several times a day; in yet another, a museum is dedicated to the detritus of people’s lives. Chabon’s influence shows up in the fact that these stories are not the “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory” stories, he said he was tired of in his introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, but, as Chabon requested, tales with plots. Wilson demonstrates that he can write artistically and thoughtfully and yet really tell a story instead of simply playing post-modernist games. And the fantastic comes into play in many of these stories, from the one about the parents who spontaneously combust to the tale in which families hire “grandparents” to enrich their childrens’ lives.This first collection is memorable. Take “Grand Stand-In,” the story about the fake grandmother, hired by a number of families to be available for hugs, kisses and chocolate chip cookies for children whose grandparents have died. Wilson carefully explains the sociological reason behind this need: people wait longer and longer to start a family, and by the time they finally get around to it, the people who would normally have offered grandmotherly and grandfatherly love are all dead. But who wants her kid to grow up without knowing the completely uncritical love of a grandparent? So these families, generally wealthy and able to offer their children anything, take the extra step of offering them grandparents. All is going well for the protagonist, who grandmothers five families and makes a tidy profit at it. She has never had a family of her own, so she gets a lot of enjoyment out of keeping track of what’s going on in her various families. But then the day comes when a family wants her to slip into the shoes of a grandmother who is still living but forced by her health to enter a nursing home – a situation that requires the protagonist to take a hard look at what she’s doing. When the twist comes toward the end of the story, it’s perfectly logical and terribly sad.Wilson seems especially good at inventing odd occupations for his characters. There’s the fellow who works in the Scrabble tile factory in “Blowing Up on the Spot,” mentioned above; he longs to be assigned the letter “E” instead of his terribly scarce “Q,” because he’s paid by the tile. Sometimes his fingers think he’s found a “Q” when it’s really only an “O.” Tough work! (Although the purpose of all this tile-finding isn’t explained, it appears that tiles are simply made in bulk and then sorted, so that by finding Q’s, the protagonist is ensuring there’s one in each game, no more and no less.) But that’s not the whole of the story, because this is the same story in which the protagonist’s parents have spontaneously combusted. No one knows why. It happened while they were on a subway. Simultaneous spontaneous combustion is almost unheard of, our protagonist tell us, and he keeps imagining what caused it and what his parents might have been thinking and feeling immediately before it happened.Another character, this one in “The Shooting Man,” works in a noise factory, the place where they put the “moo” into that container painted with cows that moos when you turn it upside down, and the voices into Chatty Cathy dolls, among other things. If you worked in such a place all day, every day, wouldn’t you be sort of fascinated at the freak show that comes into town? Especially when that show features a man who shoots himself in the face, right in front of the audience, every night. How does he blow out his brains one night and still perform again the next night? It’s not too difficult to figure out for anyone except the protagonist, though he finally gets it – when it’s too late.“The Museum of Whatnot” is one of my favorites. In this story, a young woman is employed in the title museum, charged with curating the detritus of people’s lives. She has to figure out how to display one man’s collection of spoons from different silverware sets, for instance, or the collection of letters from a teenage suicide. Not written letters, from one person to another, mind you, but letters of the alphabet this boy cut out of magazines and newspapers and saved in special notebooks. The woman’s real challenge comes when she gets a collection in from the estate of William Saroyan: rocks, paper clips, rubber bands, tin foil. It has to be displayed, because Saroyan’s will stated that no institution would get his papers if his other collections were not given equal standing. It’s not junk, and it certainly isn’t garbage; it’s “whatnot.” I’d honestly go to a museum like that just because it was so weird, wouldn’t you?Even stories that seem fairly straightforward, without a touch of the weird, tend to nonetheless be off-base somehow. There’s “Go, Fight, Win,” in which a 16-year-old cheerleader becomes fascinated by a 12-year-old boy. Is it love, hormones, or what? Why do these two click in what seems like an obviously inappropriate relationship? And why, exactly, is it so obviously inappropriate? It’s not like they’re stripping each other naked. It all feels so odd that you find yourself squirming a bit with discomfort while you read the story.Juvenile sex and love also make their appearance in “Mortal Kombat,” with two boys who are complete nerds, trivia champions on their school’s Quiz Bowl team. Neither of them thinks he’s gay, so why do they wind up kissing? It seems as much a mystery to them as to the reader, and that seems to be the point.Wilson’s stories were all previously published in literary magazines, some of which I’ve never seen or heard of before, so I’m glad this collection is available. The book also has an “about the author” section in the back of the book that had me laughing out loud, along with an interview with Wilson about specific stories and a section called “The Stories Behind the Stories” that talks about Wilson’s influences. I’m sure the idea of this section is to give book groups guidance if they should wish to read this book together, but it’s fun even for the individual reader. Wilson is on the threshold of a great career.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Some good stories here, much in the same vein as Aimee Bender and George Saunders. Reality with a heaping spoonful of the bizarre thrown in. I very much like Wilson’s writing style, and I think he manages to make his characters a little more real for all their odd circumstances than some modern short fiction writers. A very nice random-short story-collection-on-a-Saturday-afternoon find. The question and answer section with Wilson at the end is worth reading as well.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5She is a fake grandma. Although she has never had any family herself, at 56 she works for a company called Grand Stand-In, which specializes in providing grandparents to families that don’t have them. After all, as many people are waiting longer to get married and have children, many parents find themselves without living parents of their own and feel that their children are missing out on the experience of having grandparents. A Grand Stand-In can function like a regular grandparent, but can be easily killed off when the relationship becomes tedious. She loves being a Grand Stand-In, until she stands in for a family that challeneges her ideas of right and wrong.Quirky, yes? This is the epitome of Kevin Wilson’s book of short stories, the story I think was the very best in the entire collection. If you like short stories, or you like quirky, “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” is something you should check out. The only problem with quirky is that different types/examples of quirky don’t work equally well for everyone. Everything in this collection was well-written, but I definitely had a range of not really liking, liking alright, and really liking the different stories. The title story, for example, was enjoyable enough, but didn’t do much for me. My favorites were the first, ‘Grand Stand-In,’ the second, and the last. Interestingly, these were 3 of the 4 stories that particularly centered around people with quirky jobs, instead of people with quirky families or those who were just quirky, so evidently that is what most appeals to me. Because of this difference in quirky tolerance levels, I’m guessing that most people won’t love every story in this collection, but that many people will find at least a couple stories they think are fantastic.