The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions — Darrin Doyle

Novelist Christine Sneed writes that the stories in Darrin Doyle's new collection are full of rich, complicated characters and unique, unusual situations. The dark humor and pathos in these highly imaginative stories reminded me of the brilliant films of David Lynch. If Lynch wrote short fiction, it would doubtless lurk in the same neighborhood as Darrin Doyle's. These five stories take us into the delusional minds of characters who are living on the edge (of society, of sanity, of presentability). Ultimately, their needs and desires feel surprisingly, disconcertingly familiar, but we're confronted in each case with an otherness of perspective that remains unsettling and reminds us of the ordinary distances between people and the difficulty of understanding even ourselves.