See You in Paradise by J. Robert Lennon

See You in Paradise Reviews

• 
  Jane

  Five big fat stars to this one. People are weird and sometimes awful, and life is really confusing and a lot of totally inexplicable stuff happens. So does a lot of boring stuff. This is stories about that, many of which made me guffaw, some of which made me recoil. Take it slowly, read one a day. If you like things to be cheery, nice or sensible, maybe don't read it at all.
• 
  Kathryn Bashaar

  These were well-constructed, well-written stories, but most of them had no emotional resonance for me. There was one I really liked, though: A Stormy Evening at the Buck Snort Restaurant. It had so many layers in such a short story. It was about class differences, and about how thoroughly and tragically we can misunderstand each other. But most of all it was about the savage darkness that lives beneath the surface in all of us, even the neatest, cleanest, middle-class, middle-aged civilized ladies....which would be people like me.
• 
  Neil Griffin

  This was a thoroughly enjoying read. For fans of Sam Lipsyte or George Saunders, you really can't go wrong. Like the two above authors, Lennon definitely has a wheelhouse in terms of characters he's interested in. They are usually men, sometimes involved in very imperfect marriages or relationships, more likely than not to be in the lower-middle age of their late 30s, trying to do the right thing but usually falling on their face, sometimes quite poignantly so.
  
  For a story collection, it's pretty rare in that there are really no weak stories here. There's something to admire in all of them. Some of them have an element of sci-fi or fantastic elements, which does work for the most part, but I did enjoy his realist mode more. Stories like "No Life", where two couples do a sort of battle over the same kid they want to adopt (and that has an amazing asshole of a protagonist) and "Total Humiliation in 1987", about a family's last vacation before a planned divorce were both highlights for me.
  
  I'd be very curious how Lennon handles novels, so I'll probably pick up one of his in the next few months.
• 
  Ken-ichi

  I think it was my arrival at the seventh story about an early-middle-aged, sexually dissatisfied dude renegotiating his relationships when I had to put this one down. Maybe the eighth? I did like "Zombie Dan," even if it suffered from all of the same problems, probably because it managed to also be about something else, just barely, something kind of on the edge of plausibility. I liked that the undead had these insights that were uncanny but mundane, like they didn't have any useful information, just uncomfortable gossip.
• 
  Julia

  Being a fan of Lennon's novels I was looking forward to reading this but was disappointed by the first story. I don't understand put that one first, as for me it was the weakest in the collection. The collection, however, did dramatically improve. And some stories like "Zombie Dan," "Farewell Bounder" and "Total Humiliation in 1987" were excellent. The book would have been worth reading for these stories alone. I couldn't help comparing some of the stories to those of George Saunders - especially "Zombie Dan" and "Portal" as Lennon chooses similar subject matter, and strikes a similar balance between futuristic themes and portrayal of everyday American life. This is at it's best in "Zombie Dan" where doctors are able to bring people back to life. What is interesting to me isn't the subject matter but the way the characters react to what's going on. Lennon writes about the ordinary American; people who are divorced, or about to be divorced, people trying to make the best of their lives who find themselves in situations that send them, even if only momentarily, into a different mode of being and thinking. I very much enjoyed this collection - just a shame about that first story.
• 
  Catherine Mustread

  Portal, is the first short story found in See You in Paradise.  A magical shimmering thing in a suburban family's backyard causes a giddy era of family bonding.  Unfortunately the era soon comes to an end and realism returns.  The combination of reality and fantasy combined with the magical feeling of memories of happier times is subdued by the reality of teenagers and the end of enchanted times.
  
  A good review of this book can be found in the
  NYT Sunday Book Review 18 Jan 2015.
  
  I listened to this story on Selected Shorts where it was featured on a segment called
  Strange Places.
• 
  Drew

  None of the stories leap out as better than the others, per se - I don't know that there's one where you'll go "OH WOW!" and post it up as a banner example of Lennon's work. Instead, each of the stories spins together into the whole and makes this collection that oh-so-rare example of being greater than the sum of its individual parts. And those individual parts are all good. They are not connected, they are not linked - they are just all solid pieces of short fiction. And reading them on a porch or in air-conditioned suburban 'security' was just one of those perfect confluences of time, place, and story.
  
  More at RB:
  http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2014/08...
  and at TNBBC:
  http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...
• 
  Jack Shoegazer

  A solid collection, mostly domestic stories with a dark creepiness lurking, which provide much of the narrative momentum. Light on weight and epiphany for my tastes, but a good collection that gets better as it goes.
• 
  Jeff Bursey

  Thoroughly enjoyable and inventive.
  
• 
  Bliss

  These stories are so strange and surreal. Lennon has such a unique writing style that I'm dying to read more of. However, I think that the first three stories were the weakest and I almost abandoned the collection completely because of them. Fortunately, "Hibachi" turned the collection around. "Hibachi" and "Weber's Head" were my favorites.
  
  Also, I think I've found my new favorite description of a woman.
  
  "Ruperta was an arrangement of pleasing roundness, wide round eyes nestled in wide round glasses, surrounded by black parentheses of hair set atop a full, pink melon head. Her body was all balls stuck to balls: a snowman of flesh. She was my type—indeed, the perfect expression of it."
  
  If a man calls you a "snowman of flesh," marry him.
• 
  Ruth Klassert

  2020 might be the first year I have had multiple favorite short story collections read & that feels nice! I used to absolutely loathe the form as I was forced to read too many during school but last year, I forced myself to read a few collections and I decided to continue that side challenge this year, too.
  I’m glad I did because “See You In Paradise” manages to be the first book I’ve thought of as “cerebral, but in a, like, cute way.” It explores very mundane aspects of life but does so in a way that makes the ordinary fantastic or deeply thought-provoking, and I truly couldn’t get enough of how each & every story made me feel. 5/5 stars, for sure, and I definitely recommend it to both lovers & haters and anyone in between of the short story form.
• 
  Rachel

  I'm 4 months married and WOWEE, what resonance!
  
  "She can't seem to get worked up about anything these days. It's a feature of their marriage: as sexual passion has faded, so has pride, so has resentment. Sometimes she feels she may vanish completely into an undifferentiated fog of vague love." - No Life
  
  "Both of them claimed to enjoy [sex] while in its throes, but neither had ever relished the negotiations, preparations, and embarrassments necessary for its initiation." - Hibachi
  
  92 short stories to go in 222 in 2022!
• 
  Marianne

  I love happy endings (and I cannot lie).... and it spite of my love for happy endings, J. Robert Lennon is fast becoming my favorite writer. Something uneasy lurks in each and every one of the stories in this collection, but there is nothing predictable or conventional about any of the stories, or the characters. Like Lennon's Broken River, this book kept calling me back. "Just one more story," until there weren't any stories left.
• 
  Jordan

  very nice, eerie collection of stories. while all the characters sort of felt like the same person (scared man, bored woman), i liked that i could end each chapter feeling a different sort of disconcerted.
  
  my favorites in no particular order were Hibachi, Total Humiliation in 1987, No Life, and A Stormy Evening At Buck Snort Restaurant.
• 
  Aaron

  An outstanding collection of short stories - nearly all of which I wish were full novels. Zombies stands out in my mind, but I really enjoyed almost the entire collection of these unhappy relationships. Will be checking out more of Lennon's work.
• 
  P

  Happy to have read this.
  I like that it has a dark aspect to it but is not horrific.
  Curiously dark humor.
  Appreciate the imagination in these stories.
  Really enjoyed the family who had a time traveling door in their back yard.
  And the 'last vacation as a family' story.
  
• 
  ELK

  
  
  She can't seem to get worked up about anything these days. It's a feature of their marriage: as sexual passion has faded, so has pride, so has resentment. Sometimes she feels she may vanish completely into an undifferentiated fog of vague love. (Pg. 23)
• 
  Rick

  He slimes suburbia with a cynicism
  no mind cleanup crew can easily overcome.
  This raises my esteem. 3.5 STARS !
• 
  bigbonton

  almost a good idea but needs focus
• 
  Kati Heng

  A lot of short stories collections are funny but easy. It’s very simple to get a story out in 10 to 15 pages – you set up a scenario, get people to care about the characters and then hit them with the ironic twist. And a lot of the time, that’s enough. Until, that is, you read a short story collection like J. Robert Lennon’s See You in Paradise.
  
  This thing is irony plus. Sure, he follows the basic formula, sets the scene, makes you care, etc. etc., but THEN, the magic happens when Lennon delivers the ironic kicker and the story KEEPS GOING. It’s soo easy to end the joke or the story on the punchline. It’s so much harder to do what Lennon does, to keep people focused after that, to get to the place where the story really makes them laugh and think.
  
  Let’s take my favorite story, “Zombie Dan,” for example. It starts with a major medical discovery in which people are now able to pay to bring their loved ones back from the dead in a process called “revivification.” A man returns with the rest of his high-school day’s crew to greet their newly revived friend Dan, be supportive during this fragile time in his (second?) life and maybe even help teach him to talk again.
  
  Then the twist comes in: Bringing Dan back from the dead has given him the ability to know things the real Dan shouldn’t know. Suddenly, he knows what people were thinking or doing years ago, events the real living Dan never saw happen, things the real Dan would never know.
  
  Right there – so many writers would stop the story in a Goosebumps or “Tales of the Crypt”-esque kicker, thinking “It’s a short story, it’s just meant to entertain, right?” Lennon goes on to use the narrator as a vehicle for philosophical ponderings on the ethics of killing zombies, the ethics of mercy killing and just deep deep shit you’d never touch if not framed first with the tale of this zombie kid. It’s so so funny, but more than that, it’s so so wise.
  
  
• 
  Elizabeth

  Fun, silly with a touch of surreal - that's what comes to mind when I think about these stories. The subject matters tend to lean towards the dark but with such wry wit they rarely feel heavy. A story will take a normal subject matter and then just twist it - like Zombie Dan. Where your old high school buddy, who had become a real asshole, gets turned into a Zombie by an overzealous mother and then starts sleeping with your girlfriend, what's a guy to do? Or the story Portal. When your kids discovery a portal in the backyard that initially leads to.... the parking lot behind the library, how can fun not ensue? More surprising is that each story was imaginative and entertaining. Every one.
  
  After a long day of work I looked forward to reading these stories as I always got a chuckle. Also the format of the stories... long... helped overcome that horrible too short business that can be so annoying with a short story collection.
  
  
• 
  Wendy Cosin

  Lennon's short stories capture our peculiarities and blow them up, sometimes pushing darkness to the absurd. Three stories are fantastical. In Portal, family members change after exploring alternative worlds together; Zombie Dan questions the authenticity of how we live; Wraith provides an inventive way of dealing with depression. The other stories, rooted in mostly in the world as we know it, cover similar territory - dysfunctional couples, individualism, shame, family dynamics.
  
  Surprisingly, I found most of the stories vary entertaining, even though they left me feeling the pathos of it all.
• 
  David

  Full disclosure - I won an advanced copy of this thanks to the Goodreads Giveaway program and Graywolf Press...and I couldn't be happier, because I haven't been more delighted with a collection of short stories in years!
  
  The stories that appear in J. Robert Lennon's, See You in Paradise: Stories are a real treat. From the absurd to the sublime to the downright bizarre he tilts the axis on the human condition just enough to show the reader something familiar in a new and interesting way. While all of the stories were terrific, I particularly enjoyed Portal and The Accursed Items. I highly recommend it.
• 
  Carol Painter

  I was not a big fan of Mr. Lennon's book Castle (just found it too disturbing), but I am so glad that I decided to try these short stories. Even though there were several which reminded me too much of some of the creepiness of George Saunders (who I do NOT care for), several were great: No Life, The Wraith, The Accursed Items, and Farewell, Bounder are my favorites. Farewell, Bounder was a real surprise for me, who always has to know if the dog dies in movies...but this is a remarkable story. I now have no question that he is a very inspired writer and I will undoubtedly keep reading whatever he writes.
• 
  Emily Thompson

  Entertaining! And isn't that what we came for? Much to love about this eclectic collection. I'll be honest, I'd read Lennon before and was, at times, more annoyed than impressed. Comparatively, See You in Paradise carries a truer, more original appeal. Lennon didn't seem like he was trying too hard to win me over. He just did. The writing is clean and thought-provoking with occasional cliff-hanger endings. I grew to admire the unique blend of magical realism, sci-fi, comedy and standard literary fiction. If you're looking for a fresh, modern collection to take a chance on, I think this book is probably what you need.
• 
  Joseph

  Several of these (e.g. Portal, Zombie Dan, The Wraith) are the sorts of stories I wish I had succeeded in writing. And most of the rest, while not quite in my sweet spot, were worth reading as well. As is often the case in single-author collections, though, the themes that it is easy to overlook when reading one story at a time, once in a while, become overwhelmingly obvious. In this case, that theme would be hyper-competent women paired unhappily with bumbling man-children. As a bumbling man-child married to a hyper-competent woman, though, I can relate.
• 
  Leah Mosher

  A portal to another universe discovered in a suburban backyard. A dead loser friend who is brought back to life. A roommate who sculpts a more-than-lifelike replica of his own head out of clay. A list of accursed items. These are the stories that inhabit J. Robert Lennon’s collection of short fiction, which draws on 15 years of work. These pieces are delightfully odd, charmingly bizarre, and darkly comic.
• 
  Sarah

  Caveat: I kind of bounced around with these stories, and never actually completely read the whole collection (though I read the majority). The stories themselves were imaginative, unusual and surprising. My favorite was Zombie Dan, mostly due to the jaw-droppingly weird ending. There is a certain lack of context in these stories, even a disjointedness, that left me feeling unbalanced, which was wearying. It's an interesting collection, well worth occasional perusal.