A Soft Spot in the Earth's Skull

Jacob Snodgrass returns with his second collection of short stories, following the acclaimed A Sock Full of Holes (2014). A Soft Spot in the Earth's Skull includes nine finely crafted stories, at turns hilarious and terrifying, with a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue of stunted characters clawing their way through life. "Cloudy Piss" follows two roommates as they solve the mystery of the disappearance of the neighborhood cats and their own culpability in losing a girlfriend's dog. In "A Story About a Funeral" a sloppy bar crawl ends in a story of one upmanship with the newly deceased. "Couch, Then Coffin" is a terrifying tale of claustrophobia guaranteed to trigger panic if one is at all afraid of being buried alive. "What We Become" tracks an increasingly confusing world as memory erodes and meaning remains elusive. "Your Soul to Keep" edges toward science fiction of machine-aided life and the unveiling of hope or an hallucination. In "The Miraculous" a street raconteur hustles money through a tale of an unlikely resident of the moon and the mother who lost him. "Just Desserts" tells the tale of a woman whose only satisfaction in her miserable life comes in various confectionery forms until she has to consider what it actually means to be alive. In the collection's titular story a reclusive artist lurches toward transcendence through a maze of physical violations, murderous thoughts, and everyday humiliations. Concluding the collection is a piece of micro-fiction called "Flight" that stamps an absurd and indelible image on the brain of the reader, like a parting salvo from a victorious, plundering army.