Demon Days

Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno

by Jakob Dorof

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It's been a grim season for Joe Meno.

His latest, Demons in the Spring (Akashic, 272 pp., $24.95), is a collection of 20 short stories, each and every one of them steeped in the gloom of a lonely winter or a wasted summer. But when Meno feels sad, he revels in it: He's made a career out of doing just that with Hairstyles of the Damned, a conversational punk-rock update of J.D. Salinger's most famous, and The Boy Detective Fails, a book that knows it's a book, but doesn't let that get in the way of breaking some hearts.

Still, those novels made sure you were back in one piece by the last page; this time around, Meno seems content to leave you hurting. All 20 of these tales start sadly, and the vast majority of them end that way, too.

The heavy hearts of Meno's characters are here carried by war vets with phantom limbs, children hiding beneath ghostly bedsheets, and a kindhearted policeman who finds sanctuary from his failing career and marriage in the KISS army. Like The Boy Detective Fails, some of these vignettes dull the pain with a healthy dose of the absurd; in "People Are Becoming Clouds," for example, a newlywed is disappointed to discover his wife's sudden tendency to turn into a rabbit-shaped vapor every time he touches her. And it's hard to miss the black humor in "The Sound Before the End of the World," in which the aforementioned KISS cop is abandoned by his family and soon discovers a widening black hole in his neighborhood — but it's not until Peter Criss quits the band that he knows his life is truly hopeless.

Still, Meno's portraits of pain are hard to swallow in close succession, especially with stories like "I Want the Quiet Moments of a Party Girl," a surprisingly candid tale of a couple trying to survive the experience of a stillborn baby, and the self-explanatory comparisons of "The Unabomber and My Brother." Although not quite as satisfying as Meno's longer works, Demons is a beautifully crafted collection and benefits greatly from the illustrations of 20 diverse and well-matched artists from around the world. Consider also that a portion of the book's proceeds are being donated to 826CHICAGO, a nonprofit tutoring center in the Windy City, and you've got a great book that's giving to a good cause. Just don't read too much in one sitting — we can't all deal with the doldrums as well as Meno can.

(j_dorof@citypaper.net)