Minus, His Heart is one of those odd stories that just doesn’t quite seem to make sense upon the first reading. It has a hallucinatory quality that carries the reader along without ever quite grounding itself. At its heart, the story is a quest story. A boy must help a man from the town where he lives recover an item that the boy has stolen. There is a mix of old-fashioned language interspresed into the story that gives a sense of timelessness to its tone and a sense of urgency about the quest. There are only a few characters in the story, but the world in which the story is set is very interesting, indeed. Each person has a deck in the middle of their chest which has a mix tape. This mix tape is what the boy has stolen from Minus, and what they attempt to recover. There is a stop at a playground, which is where children come from (quite literally, as it turns out), and a climactic scene in a zoo full of human oddities. This is the kind of story that sticks with the reader, not necessarily because of a perfect sense of understanding or relating to it, but because, days later, you’ll still be mulling it over and trying to figure out just exactly what happened.
This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.
