Zolitude

March 26, 2018
Cooper’s debut collection is an intriguing but flawed mash-up of the fantastic, the dystopian, and the vaguely apocalyptic. One of the best stories, “Pre-Occupants,” relates the tale of three couples who have been sent to another planet as early scientist-colonizers. It gnomically catalogues their relationships and gossip, as seen when Paul and the narrator invite another couple over for dinner. In an act of unexplained weirdness, one of the guests, Tava, uses hair clippers to shave a strip of her blond hair. Each member of the colonizing crew has had isolation training, which, as one of the characters remarks, means that “the cure is also the cause” of their social isolation and bizarre interactions. “Slave Craton” moves around in time before and after a semi-apocalyptic environmental disaster, layering a disturbing love triangle among a young man, his ex-girlfriend, and an emotionally intense ecowarrior over philosophical discussions about what it means to be a good person. Less successful is the title story, set in a brutalist housing development in Riga, Latvia. It tells the simultaneous stories of a relationship falling apart and a nascent long-distance one, both characterized by ambiguity, narcissism, and dishonesty, but it never manages to feel coherent or purposeful. Cooper has a keen eye for the quirks of human behavior and is skilled at capturing individual moments, but she is less adept at making them add up to something bigger.

Starred review from March 1, 2018

In the title story of this spikily surreal debut collection, one of the characters declares, "Neuroscientists have concluded that love and fear are the only two physiologically measurable emotions," and those emotions radiate throughout these vivid, complex stories, though fear seems to predominate. Acting as go-between for Simona, who intuits that her lover intends to kill her, the narrator of "Zolitude" meets the troublesome Lars at a wine bar (where "daylight shows up to eat its lunch over our desks, then leaves") and finally absorbs the sense of unease. Popov, a police officer who once patrolled the mountains on a huge black gelding with claws for hooves, recalls courting his wife at a time when anarchists were rioting. Another fierce, birdlike creature punishes men for their sins as the book bus woman tries to save one of them. In yet another story, a man hoping to visit an ancient temple is blocked by a creature with "mean little forearms" and eventually encounters scenes of ongoing war ("POWs eating their own bowels in tiger cages"). VERDICT Not for the fainthearted or lovers of straightforward plot, but brilliant for anyone preferring heightened reading.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2018
These stories from a Canadian writer feature characters at odds with their surroundings--and each other.In her debut collection, Cooper proves that she can do just about anything. She's as comfortable telling a story from the perspective of a hip young record-label employee--which she actually is, in her day job--whose hand is blown off by a mail bomb ("Ryan & Irene, Irene & Ryan") as she is telling the story of a mounted police officer who lives on the edge of loss and violence ("The Emperor"). Her settings are equally wide-ranging. A Vietnam War veteran lives out his retirement in the same country he once fought against in "Spiderhole." In "Pre-Occupants," husband-and-wife scientists arrive on Mars and must adjust to their new environment--and their new neighbors. This isn't the only story with sci-fi leanings. Cooper moves as fluidly through genre as she does through character and setting, recounting the tale of a nuclear reactor attempting to replace the sun in "Record of Working" and a woman who built a time machine when she was a child in "Thanatos." What unites these eclectic stories is Cooper's style--sharp-edged and oblique, these are not narratives that move in usual ways. Like a poet, Cooper is relentlessly original in every sentence: a drunk's hand "is waving tentacular over his private cemetery of beer bottles"; mountains are "imbricate rows of corroded teeth." The logic of the stories seems poetic, too; what would be traditional narrative context is often jettisoned in favor of a resonant image or associational logic. Occasionally, plots and subplots have obscure relationships to each other. In short, these are not stories whose meanings unfold cleanly.Readers willing to give themselves over to some mystery will be rewarded.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.