Sheep and Wolves, Jeremy C. Shipp’s short story collection follow-up to his debut 2007 novel, Vacation, is not a quick read. Though only 160 pages, this collection demands an investment deeper than its length would suggest. Wearing the skin of the absurd while hiding the guts of a literary paranormal investigation, the collection defies casual reading and easy categorization. Sheep and Wolves must be approached carefully, chewed slowly, and swallowed cautiously.

The tales, rarely more than 10 pages in length individually, are challenging enough to traditional modes of storytelling that one must relearn the art of interpretation in order to fully appreciate them. Whether this is due to a protagonist’s drug-fueled mindset, or due to the simple idea that a story need not have a drug-fueled protagonist to be strange and unwieldy, Shipp’s stories refuse to be bound by accepted storytelling conventions.

One of the more jarring escapes from convention is the tendency for the stories of S&W to rarely establish themselves in a physical setting; asking instead that the reader make sense of context by judge of character interaction and observation. This idea isn’t new; minimalist authors have been doing it for years. However, by combining this mode with the other aspects of the bizarro genre (from BizarroCentral.com: “…often contains a certain cartoon logic that, when applied to the real world, creates an unstable universe where the bizarre becomes the norm and absurdities are made flesh”), Shipp offers an entertainingly unbalanced platform from which to leap and let his world do with you what it wants.

The story, “Baby Edward,” one of my favorites, for example, begins: There’s more than one way to kill a dream [pg. 30], and continues from there hovering between the realspace of a nondescript backyard and the headspace of our narrator. The magic of this “blurry storytelling,” whether in the aforementioned “Baby Edward,” the hypnopompic hallucinatory mind of the narrator of “Nightmare Man,” or any of the other stories, is that a character’s headspace is the realspace. Though the stories challenge the reader to discern reality from unreality, the reader is slowly taught that the purposeful blur is meant to show how unnecessary such distinctions really are.

Be warned; this collection will polarize audiences, splitting readers according to their willingness to trust in an untethered voice. Sheep and Wolves does not believe in beach reading or in hammocks and hot chocolate. It does not believe in love at first sight or in happy marriages. To be happy, Sheep and Wolves says, is to embrace the absurd. “Lies are cheaper than therapy” [pg. 69].

Welcome to the bizarro fiction movement; hail Jeremy C. Shipp.