Matthew's Reviews > A Stranger in this World

“A Stranger in This World”
Stories by Kevin Canty
First Vintage Contemporaries
New York, 1995

Prepare for the dramatic and unnerving as you begin to read Kevin Canty’s debut short story collection, seeing the world from the eyes of victims of chance and choice. His stories will leave you feeling like a stranger in his world, as he creates striking characters and unexpected events. But his stories aren’t all that strange. All of them set in a world not too different from our own, removed only by time, they show us possible paths that anyone can take and their consequences. These dark tales then become relatable, the plots and characters almost become real.

Beginning his collection with the short story “King of Elephants,” Canty starts with the dysfunction of a broken family. Told from the son’s point of view, the story opens with a police officer calling to tell the son that his mother is has been picked up as a transient. The boy takes this in stride, going to alert his father, an alcoholic. As the two leave the bar, the reader begins to see the son’s inner struggle, how he has to deal with his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s mental instabilities. This seems to be a major theme in this collection, that one character inherits the problems of those they love, or think they love. In “Pretty Judy,” Canty creates an odd tale of love and hate. When Paul figures out that he can easily take advantage of the mentally disabled girl who lives in his neighborhood, he begins to have mixed emotions. Knowing what he did was wrong, but still continuing to see her; he begins to believe that he has fallen in love with her. Following his affairs, a series of events unfolds that quickly show Paul the consequences of his actions.

From “Pretty Judy” to “Moonbeams and Aspirin,” Canty creates stories that could happen to both the best and worst of people. He crafts tales not so distant from what anybody could face, the overlying theme of all the stories being that of going down the wrong road. The use of characters and their feelings and thoughts, as well as the powerful usages of imagery make the stories seem even more real. Whether you are visiting an overturned trailer, or a small town in Florida, Canty is able to draw the reader in and keep them on his ride with every twist and turn of the story. The only drawback to this work is that his word choice seems a little odd at times. This doesn’t detract from meaning in the stories, and is excusable for his first work. Painting dark and moody pictures, full of the unexpected, Canty has managed to create an exciting set of unusual tales that aren’t all that unusual.