Monkey Puzzle Press
58 pgs. / $10.00

Review by Matt Pincus

The Whack-Job Girls & Other Stories is a chapbook compiled from flash fiction pieces, the nouveau riche vignettes of current literature. ZoBell, in an interview with Rumjhum Biswas says, “Every single story came from prompts in the Flash Factory at Zoetrope Virtual Studio.” She goes on to say that prompts are ways for her to write about characters, scenarios, or themes she would normally not conceive or imagine.

Although this is true for most authors, ZoBell is able to capture a poetic lyric in short narratives of socially and economically outcast women in her text: the maid working at an upscale hotel called upon to attend to a room at three AM, or the Midwesterner from Spokane who rides a train to Harlem when “the only black people [she] ever saw were Crips and Bloods in movies of the week.” These stories develop their characters’ personal situations (a mother having phone sex for extra income or a woman who sells her Mustang to pay the credit card bill) but there is also a layer of gothic séance, which produces a feeling one gets from a Denis Johnson or Shirley Jackson novel. Continue reading →