Unlucky Lucky Days

By Vince Darcangelo, Special to the Rocky

Thursday, June 5, 2008

* Fiction. By Daniel Grandbois. BOA Editions, $14. Grade: B

Plot in a nutshell: As the bassist for Tarantella and Slim Cessna's Auto Club, two of Denver's most original and idiosyncratic bands, Grandbois has had a hand in creating a sonic landscape at once primal and absurdist - sparse, yet hinting at something deeper lying beneath the dusty surface.

Turning his talent to fiction, Grandbois' prose is similar to his musical leanings, as evidenced in his new book.

A collection of 73 works of flash fiction (the average story length is one page, with a few measuring in at a paragraph or two), Unlucky Lucky Days reads like a collection of parables or, at its finer moments, Zen koans.

Grandbois' stories typically feature inanimate objects or anthropomorphized animals as protagonists, be it an upturned chair, half covered with snow, trying not to draw attention to itself, or a termite in the throes of an existential crisis.

Sample of prose: "The drapery didn't mind that its two halves might as well have been sewed together. Even so, thoughts of what it was hiding haunted the twelve-foot panels of blue velvet. The window couldn't offer any help. It could see out, but it couldn't see in. Some days, it wished it were a mirror, not knowing that while it slept that's exactly what it was."

Pros: The better stories here - Toothpaste, The Last Supper and Humpert - are darkly comic in nature and could be the unfinished works of Edward Gorey. (And yes, these shorties would lend themselves well to illustrations, especially in the hands of an artist with a knack for gallows humor.)

Cons: The abstract nature of the stories can be entertaining, but at times the deeper meaning of each piece - if there is one - is indiscernible. They need more narrative grounding to keep the reader engaged.

Final word: At its best, Unlucky Lucky Days is like a peyote trip in the desert - things seem familiar, but different. If you really immerse yourself in these stories, you might find yourself questioning whether Grandbois' cracked perception just might be right.