Weird times call for weird writers. Luckily, there’s a whole genre of weird writers to choose from. Weird fiction is more than a centiury old at this point, but the tradition is alive and well. Here’s more from Jason Ockert on LitHub:
Millhauser’s stories almost always disorient right off the bat. The first story in We Others is called “The Slap.” The piece opens when a man, Walter Lasher, is approached by a stranger in a parking lot and is slapped hard in the face. The attack is, apparently, unprovoked and a random act of violence. From the onset, we have some questions: What did Walter do to deserve this? How is he going to respond to the attack? Who is the Slapper?
In these stories, aliens are landing, ghosts are narrating, the art of magic is alive, a knife thrower comes to town, and yes, characters are slapped in the face. Shocking a reader at the beginning of a story as a means of tricking them onto the page is not difficult. The hard part is to coax the reader along—sentence by sentence—and the greatness of Millhauser’s work is not in its disorientation but in the way that he re-orients you. “The Slap,” for example, is a pattern story. This style of story takes advantage of escalation—first Walter Lasher is slapped, then Robert Sutliff is slapped, then Charles Kraus is slapped!—until the strangeness of getting slapped feels familiar. In fact, a reader starts to wonder why more people aren’t getting slapped.