The Last Gas Station and Other Stories — Tom Clark

Tom Clark's collection of short fiction, The Last Gas Station, is in two contrasting parts. It opens with 23 very short prose pieces—amusingly surreal California vignettes, some no longer than a page, peopled by denim-clad cowgirls, itinerant lover boys, Martin Heidegger, Boris Pasternak, Muslim college students, Vietnam vets, Ty Cobb, Ted Berrigan, and a great dinosaur poet of the Jurassic period. These are followed by the novella Incident at Basecamp, an odd matter-of-fact account of a close encounter between a young married couple and a spindly, three-toed, mind-reading extraterrestrial somewhere deep in the Rocky Mountain wilderness.Clark is versatile, wrote the Los Angeles Times; he's a poet turned sportswriter turned novelist whose range is brilliantly showcased by this substantial collection. The opening sketches are playful and delightful, but in the tradition of 'biggest is best,' The Last Gas Station closes with a wallop: 'Incident at Basecamp' [is] a sturdy science-fiction novelette.