Good People

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez's unforgettable Good People. In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life's unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway. Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez's stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity.