Lawrence Klavan’s The Family Unit and Other Fantasies rides a rush of paranoid anxiety—and manages to induce a great deal of it, too. It’s also a genre-straddler, but in Klavan’s case, impending doom is the genre—and that’s refreshingly open-ended.

The title story has a mysterious corporation making an offer on Arch’s family, and the anxiety is existential in a very weird way. Klavan’s background as a writer of graphic novels and screenplays is evident in the pacing and use of attention-grabbing detail at just the right point in the story to pull us farther in rather than allowing our attention to shift.

Reminiscent of Rod Serling, the weird that turns up in these stories is in fact aimed at teaching us some truth about our inner workings, whether it’s the post-storm refugees who seem to want help but may be after something more, or the weirdness of how arousal arrives when we least expect it. What shines through, powerfully, in these stories is the simple reality that the weirdest things happen the closest to home.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com ( )