new york times

The Plot Thickens

By Katie Benson

New York Times Book Review Sunday June 31, 2009

900Stories

900stories.com
by Zigzag

We get asked to review practically everything. Over the years we have developed guidelines of significance and fairness to fill our limited space. Occasionally we succumb to public opinion (the ultimate arbiter) and let an unusual work slip past the gate. 900stories does not exist on paper. Zigzag calls it wiki-fiction - a web based genre featuring tags, search-boxes, and hyperlinks. One more excuse to slip your Kindle into the beach bag. All that aside lets consider the words and illustrations contained therein.

The title would lead you to believe its an homage to Salinger. Don't worry, its not. The first half of the book is a collection of plot studies - lovingly called seeds. Each plot is reinforced by a photograph or hand drawn illustration from the author's notes. The bulk of the photographs (which incidentally are quite striking) are abstract night views of Portland Maine. Plots are interspersed with dialog between a human and a paramecium. More on that later. Throughout the book you will find occurrences of actual people and places in Oxford County Maine.

900stories is rife with satire and self-referential intrusions. As plots accumulate you feel as if you are spinning in circles like a hapless dish-bound paramecium. At one point the author steps into the book, like Vonnegut, to offer a sales pitch to the reader. "Keep reading. You'll get lucky tonight." The reader is transported to a seminal July 1988 Grateful Dead concert at the Oxford Plains Speedway, followed by the "ending" in which two local musicians head off into the sunset in a flying saucer. At this point its not clear to the reader just what the hell is going on. The ending occurs less than halfway through the book.

The false ending and subsequent unfolding is the crux of the imperative which compelled us to review this work. Seed plots and subplots mix as if poured into a defective splattering centrifuge. An underlying theme of "devolution vs.evolution" develops into structural conflict reminiscent of Orwell's Animal Farm. "One cell good, many cells bad". Remember the paramecium and human? Up to this point subplots are constrained to variations on themes revealed in the seed plots. The seal is broken and plots escape into the real world. Like a meth-racked flight attendant, the plot count ramps up to 900 and beyond.

I guarantee you will not be able to read this book in one sitting. I was overwhelmed. Humor is served up dry. One dimensional characters will charm you. I found myself rooting for a pit bull that eats children. The plot structure - or should I say: structure-of-plots makes Pynchon look like Geisel. The cover illustration (pictured here) is a graph of that labyrinthine structure. I'm told the original graces the side of an Oxford County barn. Zigzag has raised the bar in this first opus. In a strange new genre 900stories is a work to be reckoned with. Like Borges' Library of Babel, these 900 stories will open your mind and turn it inside out.