Reviews and Praise for Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

“The detonating qualities of strong emotion appear in several stories, but Wilson is equally preoccupied with the absurdity of his imagined modern world…Wilson’s true gift is for depicting the dangers of strong, complex emotions…Wilson’s protagonists are frequently survivors, marred and changed from their exposure to the world.  And when Wilson leaves behind his quirkiest conceits to focus on this more subtle material, his work shimmers…Wilson offers fabulous twists and somersaults of the imagination…As Wilson continues to dig into the texture and mystery of the world, his fiction should grow, like his best characters, in strange and remarkable ways.”
-New York Times Book Review, 4/5/2009

“Wilson animates his stories with a smart sense of humor. The lonely narrator of the title story majored in Morse code in college and bemoans the fact that all anyone wants to know how to tap out is “I love you” and “SOS”: “And if they were in a situation where they actually had to resort to using Morse code for help, well, they weren’t going to get it. They were going to die.” Humor is key to the clever-by-half stories, but it comes naturally to Wilson and his characters.”
-Time Out Chicago, 4/2/2009

“These 11 stories, by turns hilarious and elegiac, unfold like delicious, ripened dreams, and then abruptly explode into nightmares…Wilson does a spectacular job of maneuvering between voices and worlds, and in the process delivers a wide, convincingly erratic range of human emotion. To write such masterful stories takes a graceful eye, and, even more, a compassionate heart. Wilson has both. His disturbing, moving tales burrow their way under our skin and stay there.”
-Time Out New York, 4/6/2009

A Southern writer with a bent sense of humor offers a fine debut collection of stories, some unlike anything you’ve read before.
Wilson displays a marvelous sense of narrative ingenuity.  One of the more resonant entries, “Grand Stand-In,” concerns a woman who joins a blossoming industry, playing grandmother to fractured families.  Other stories sensitively document the emotional trials of adolescence: In “Mortal Kombat,” two teenaged boys do battle with their budding, bewildering sexuality, and in “Go, Fight, Win,” a reluctant young cheerleader muses that “sex seemed like chicken pox, inevitable and scarring.”
Hints of Southern Gothicism may be found among these pages.  One story, “Birds in the House,” details a bizarre ritualistic contest whose winner will inherit an antebellum estate, while another, “The Shooting Man,” finds a young man named Guster obsessed with that most rural of spectacles, the traveling sideshow.  More often, though, the author tells stories that ring true, and that feature innovative plots and the wit of indie comedy.
The best of the lot, “Blowing Up on the Spot,” concerns a man, Leonard, who works as a sorter at a Scrabble factory when he’s not coping with his suicidal brother, crushing on the girl who works in the candy shop and, well, worrying about what is, for him, the very real danger of spontaneous combustion.
Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts: new ideas.
-Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review), 2/15/2009

Wilson’s captivating debut collection paints an everyday world filled with characters obsessed by weird impulses. Whether it’s Guster, the narrator of “The Shooting Man,” who goes to great lengths to discover the secret of a sideshow performer whose trick is to shoot himself in the face, or the three bored college grads of the title story who compulsively dig a tunnel beneath their town, Wilson creates a lively landscape with rich and twisted storytelling. A few stories satirize the odd ways families react to tragedy, for example, “Grand Stand-in,” which revolves around an elderly woman hired by families who wish to avoid telling their children about an unforeseen death. Two of the best stories involve teens: in “Mortal Kombat,” two unpopular quiz bowl stars become enamored of a video game and each other, while “Go, Fight, Win,” features a cheerleader who prefers building model cars to the company of her schoolmates. While Wilson has trouble wrapping up a few stories (“Blowing Up on the Spot,” “The Museum of Whatnot”), most are fresh and darkly comedic in a Sam Lipsyte way.
-Publisher’s Weekly, 12/1/2008

“The world of Kevin Wilson’s “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” is at once familiar and new. The stories are set in a believable though exaggerated America of martial arts video games, Scrabble factories, sideshow acts, and spontaneous combustion. With their absurdist elements, these oddball tales recall the fiction of Steven Millhauser and George Saunders.”
-Boston Globe, 4/9/2009

“Kevin Wilson’s fiction feels like the work of a species entirely distinct from Aleksandar Hemon. For Slavic soul, substitute Southern anomie; in place of elegant continental modernism, put scattershot pop-culture mash-ups. Hemon writes characters who hate college football and cheeseburgers; Wilson depicts a puppy-love homosexual relationship that plays out within the mayhem of the video game “Mortal Kombat.” “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth”  gets under your skin, though; Wilson’s little time-bomb fables have a surrealist zip, like miniature Magritte paintings come to life.”
-The Washington Post, 7/8/2009

“Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, a debut collection of stories by Kevin Wilson, turns the genre of Southern fiction on its head.  In the vein of Steven Millhauser, Wilson’s characters confront mundane problems in offbeat situations: an inheritance is decided by a complex game involving electric fans and origami birds; recent college grads avoid the “real world” by creating a network of tunnels under their neighborhood; and –in what could have been lifted from a Jan Svankmajer animation–the scandal of an extramarital affair is overshadowed by the couple’s grotesque baby, who was born with a full set of sharp, sparkling white teeth.  Wilson creates nightmarish hyper-realities by literalizing familiar metaphors, like a 12-year-old whose love is so fiery that he actually ignites himself in an attempts to woo an older girl.  While his bizarre plots can occasionally become distracting, Wilson’s fully realized characters keep the stories grounded.”
-Bomb Magazine (Editor’s Choice) – Number 107, Spring 2009

“Wilson’s stories, however, pass beyond whimsy, beyond satire, to the place where contemporary suburban fiction steps off into the abyss of unreality…Acute and uniformly unsettling, these fictions explore themes of loss and loneliness with fresh young insight, and occasionally with a faint rainbow at the end.”
Boston Globe (Short Takes), 4/19/2009

“…all  the stories in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth are lush with imagination, humanity, and wit. It is a testament to Wilson’s talent how often he spins out a line that, though absurd, feels completely organic to the character thinking or saying it. Thanks to his slanted inventiveness, the conceptual fabric of Wilson’s tales always feels fresh, even foreign, while his characters, and the plights they plow through, are easily recognizable.”
-The Rumpus, 4/25/2009

Kevin Wilson’s stories in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth are…more the twisted offspring of George Saunders. But underneath the surrealism beats a pure and beautiful heart. His characters may be employed by companies that send out fake grandparents to real families, search for ‘Q’ tiles in a Scrabble factory or work for firms called Worst-Case Scenario Inc. All of them, however, radiate real tenderness and yearning.
-Louisville Courier-Journal, 8/22/2009

“With simple and succint prose, Wilson asks us to search for our place in the world, whether it be above or beneath the ground, and to recognize beauty and hope even in the “worst-case scenarios” of our lives.  In doing so, he reminds us that nothing is unthinkable and everything is unpredictable.”
-Mid-American Review, Volume XXIX, Number 1

“Wilson uses a warped lens to examine the world from a fresh perspective in this darkly comic collection…Absurd and utterly engaging, Wilson’s stories often sneakily turn heart-breaking. He has a gift for tunneling through hilarious situations to lay bare the raw emotions that make his characters so very real. In the author’s bio, Wilson reveals his motivation: “…I wish that there were more artistic and noble reasons that I put pen to paper, but the truth of the matter is that I wanted people to kiss me and I had the unfounded notion that, if I wrote a good enough story, people would be compelled to make out with me.” Pucker up, Wilson — these stories are great.”
-77 Square, 3/27/09

“Kevin Wilson’s brilliant debut is full of characters you won’t be able to forget and wouldn’t want to even if you could, such as the circus act who gets shot in the face night after night after night. Lucky him for being a character in such a tender, one-of-a-kind book. Lucky us for having the chance to read it.”
—Brock Clarke, bestselling author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

“If Kevin Wilson didn’t write so crisply, so subtly, with such a sure understanding of human nature and the ways of the world, I’d be tempted to say he was on something stronger than coffee when he wrote these stories—his imagination is that fertile and wonderfully offbeat. These superb, often audacious stories rework the ordinary into surreal yet hauntingly plausible worlds, and we emerge seeing ourselves with fresh, if somewhat nervous, clarity.”
—Ben Fountain, PEN/Hemingway award-winning author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

“Each of Kevin Wilson’s beautifully imagined stories crackles with originality. He can break your heart and mend it in the same line, and he can fold a universe of loss into the smallest, most delicate gesture. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth is a refreshingly wild book, shot through with wicked humor and deep, affirming humanity, and it marks the arrival of a first-rank writer.”
—Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi and Naming the World

“Kevin Wilson is the unholy child of George Saunders and Carson McCullers. All the signs are there: the ability to realize the most bizarre situations with perfect control; the understanding that sometimes the saddest things are hilarious; and a willingness to always let his characters have their way, even as we pray for him to stop them. Bow your heads! Jesus Christ is this guy good.”
—Owen King, author of We’re All In This Together

“You have to be careful reading this book. Kevin Wilson writes fiction that moves so quickly from twisted hilarity to strange, delicate beauty that you might not notice—-until it’s too late—-that your heart is good and broken. This collection is like the spontaneous combustion one story in it describes: urgent, amazing, and on fire.”
—Alix Ohlin, author of The Missing Person and Babylon and Other Stories

“Kevin Wilson’s stories show us a world that is both real and full of illusion. One imagines the skies that sit over these towns are always a particularly vibrant shade of blue. The characters are people we almost know, and yet their lives are heightened, peculiar, both more dazzling and more tragic than our own. In turning the world not upside down but maybe twenty degrees on its side, he forces us to look at our own lives in a new and slightly off-kilter way. He is a dazzling and important new writer.”
—Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Bel Canto and Run

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth has everything a reader needs: a Grandmother-for-hire, a baby with a full set of teeth, spontaneous combustion, and a cavalcade of Scrabble tiles, falling from the sky. It also has some of the best writing I’ve seen in a long, long time. Kevin Wilson’s stories not only tunnel to the center of the earth—they tunnel through the intricacies of family, love and the dark places of the human soul.
—Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and Animal Crackers