A satirical look at the crazy things society does to avoid going crazy.

I can't seem to find appropriate adjectives to describe "Better Living Through Plastic Explosives"; weird, unnerving, volatile and wild all come to mind but none perfectly captures this funny "ha ha" and funny "strange" collection. Gartner's West Coast provides the background for otherworldly visitations, squatter camps and body part-containing trash bags, displaying a nervy mix of scientific ideas, quackery and pop culture. Granted, some stories deal with the more mundane: relationship woes, a child's unsatisfactory art grade, real estate transactions. But regardless of plot, all Gartner's tales contain acute observation, vivid description and sharply drawn characters. Her twisty, dense sentences move from sardonic to plangent, wry to heartfelt in a mere clause or two while avoiding the category of "too cerebral." Ultimately, the collection blends the extraordinary with the very ordinary, the hybrid stories animated by a fact-happy, snarky and inventive author.

Wow this book took me a long time to get through! I loved the first short story was great but after it became very tedious. I felt very apathetic towards the characters.

A very interesting collection of short stories that I would call "what if..." stories. Stories that take something from our lives, a trend, a news items, an observation on society and take it to an extreme and see what happens. From the adoption of Chinese baby girls to aging sixties activists living suburban lives, Gartner takes everyday society in Canada today and says "what if". Thought-provoking and mind-boggling, this collection will have you reeling.

Brilliant, but a hard slog to read.

In her new short story collection, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, Zsuzsi Gartner cuts a satirical swath through the early years of the new millennium. Everyone and everything is fair game, with Gartner's laser sights set on those who smack of entitlement or hubris. Whatever we now call yuppies and their older demographic successors are and apparently always will be up for grabs, and Gartner takes no prisoners in terms of mocking their houses and lawns, their dietary, career and fashion choices, their family planning and rearing decisions and more. Gartner arranges to mock and reproach them from diverse angles, sources and perspectives. She is also quick to point out that anyone with economic or social pretensions can become them in a heartbeat, and can be brought down a sharp notch or two as quickly and calamitously. Earthy and quirky comeuppances come to the proud and prissy from everyone from a lusty, barbecue-loving redneck, to another variant of tattooed white trash in a bass-thumping muscle car, to a disquietingly media savvy native elder destined for bespoke suits (with ambitions to become the First Nations Ivan Reitman, don't you know). The range of characters marching through Gartner's dizzying stories is breathtaking, not without their piquantly realistic and emotional moments, but ultimately verging on cartoonish, with a didactic, Coyote versus Road Runner sense of who will prevail and why. So, fleeting jabs aside, if we're not really meant to wholly and realistically identify with any characters or situations in these stories, what is Gartner trying to achieve with this collection? Is it pre-apocalyptic magic realism, post-apocalyptic surrealism or some other variant of an otherworldly, off-kilter, something-is-not-quite-right-here rising tide of dread of apocalypse in progress, vaguely reminiscent of DeLillo's White Noise? If it's any of those, she often overshoots that effect, sometimes grievously. Are we just being lectured at in an over-the-top, albeit highly imaginative fashion? But then again, something stirring happens when you breathe and digest each story, and set the entire collection down. Weeks later, images and scenarios that seem overwrought as you're reading them have distilled down from a headlight glare to a haunting, still potent glow after the fact: adopted Chinese daughters tiptoeing grotesquely across the starlit snow; a couple rapidly growing apart by heading in opposite Dorian Gray-esque directions; suburban housewives happily squatting like cavewomen around a fire pit; a bewildered but determined movie producer in sullied designer trousers struggling through the West Coast rainforest; most memorably of all, the final roar of a car approaching that will exact a harsh but symmetrical revenge.