Manuel Gonzales (1)

Somewhere in New York, in an underground lair beneath a highly exclusive travel agency that serves as its cover, there is an organization known as The Regional Office. Most of the travel agency employees don't know it's there, and certainly don't know what their employer's real business is.

But if you happen to make your way from the Morrison World Travel Concern to a particular elevator, you will be taken nearly a mile underground, and when the elevator doors open, you will see written on show more the wall:

"The Regional Office: uniquely positioned to Empower and Strengthen otherwise troubled or at-risk Young Women to act as a Barrier of last resort between the survival of the Planet and the amassing Forces of Darkness that Threaten, at nearly every turn, to Destroy It."

Yes, it's another top-secret organization of secret agents, all of them female, devoted to saving the world from an array of horrifying (and, it is suggested, probably supernatural) threats. And it is at the Regional Office that Gonzales begins his story, very much in medias res, as a team of agents -- again, all women -- prepares to attack and (they hope) to destroy the Office.

It's a structurally complicated book. We begin with two central characters. Rose is heading the assault team, and Sarah is forced to rally her co-workers in defense, a task for which she is only partially prepared. Not only do we alternate between those two points of view, but we are also alternating for each of them between the day of the attack and flashback chapters which fill in their backstories.

And the first third of the book, when the focus is on the attack itself, is terrific stuff. Rose and Sarah are vivid characters, and Gonzales writes action scenes that mix thrills and comedy in unexpected ways. An "interlude" chapter called "The Hostage Situation" is a particular delight, following a half-dozen of the men who work in the travel agency and have somehow gotten caught up in a battle they cannot begin to make sense of.

But as the book goes on, Gonzales keeps piling on characters and backstories and complications -- as if all of the flashbacks weren't enough, there's eventually a flashforward to ten years later -- and it all begins to crumble under its own weight.

Gonzales has done a thorough and complex job of world-building. He hints at characters and story lines which could make marvelous books in their own right. I would happily read a novel about Oyemi and Mr. Niles founding the Regional Office, or about Henry's work as the head of recruitment, or a collection of stories about the Office's great operatives and their most daring missions.

The problem is that Gonzales has tried to stuff all of those stories into one book, which gives none of them the room they need to breathe. Everything feels rushed and incomplete; things that ought to be entire chapters are crammed into single sentences.

And with insufficient time to tell any of the stories he wants to tell within his particular fictional corner of the world, Gonzales can't pay any attention at all to the world outside the Regional Office. Does the greater world know of all the threats from which the Office's operatives have saved it? Who was fighting off those threats before the Office? What connection, if any, does the Office have to the world's governments? Without a broader context, the Regional Office feels too hermetically sealed and insulated from reality, and that winds up reducing the stakes. Who's going to know about, or care about, whether the attack on the Office succeeds or fails? How is the world going to be changed by the result?

To be sure, there are worse authorial sins than too much ambition. Better a writer should attempt too much than be content to lazily coast on formulaic tropes and formulas. And even as the storytelling and plotting get more and more convoluted, Gonzales's prose is always fun to read. I will be curious to see what he does next, and I hope that he will learn a bit of restraint to go along with his unbridled energy and creativity. show less

Into the first few of the stories in this, Manuel Gonzales's first collection, I had this sense that he was dipping a toe into that (probably now out-of-fashion) trend of slipstream, in which extraordinary features are folded into ostensibly mundane realities and the resulting contrast is intended to make some profound statement about our world. While Gonzales's work was solid, the "hey, isn't this weird?" factor was just too loud.

But a few stories in and the author's strengths finally were show more coming through. A story about a father who turns into a werewolf makes a powerful comment on the ruin of mental illness on a family. An unusually half-assed science fiction scenario becomes a clever commentary on the absurdity of popular entertainment. (This one, "Life on Caprica II", was such a great discovery I hate to say anything about it.) Of course, your interpretations may differ and probably will. In the best pieces, Gonzales can evoke strong realizations by way of a cute or imaginative tale without ever showing his hand, without saying the exact words that would blow the cover. The effects were for this reader enough to convince him maybe to revisit the beginning of the book again.

Having said that, though, overall the book is uneven. Many of the short, mini-biography styled pieces don't hang around long enough to seem to say anything, and the three longest stories each are guilty of not growing much past the initial premise. Nonetheless, I find this is an author to watch in the future. show less

The so-called Regional Office is an organization that uses young super-powered women and precognitive oracles to combat the amassing forces of darkness, while disguised as a super-fancy travel agency. And the Regional Office is, as the title indicates, under attack: by a different group of young super-powered women, and mercenaries, and alienated employees.

It's a pretty odd book, but not because of the fantastical elements. In fact, those mostly consist of a collection of fun but familiar show more fantasy/superhero/action movie tropes (albeit with an interestingly original idea here and there). It's more the way those tropes are approached that's odd, as if the novel's focus is constantly just a little to the left of where you'd expect it to be, taking for granted or leaving unexplained things that most stories would make a point of concentrating on, while focusing on details that most stories would largely ignore.

The structure is also odd. Mostly it features the POV of one of two women, each on a different side of the conflict. Within each POV section, very short chapters alternate rapidly between the present action and that character's past, sometimes even featuring flashbacks within the flashbacks. Which maybe isn't too weird, but then there are the sections that are supposedly extracted from a scholarly analysis of the events written many years later, which are full of details that may or may not have happened, presented in a decidedly unobjective style that makes you wonder just who these future scholars are and exactly what they know. Oh, and then there's the interlude that's written largely in first person plural...

Not all of this works equally well, I think, but parts of it work brilliantly. In the end, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it all, or quite what I make of it, but reading it was an interesting experience, and mostly an enjoyable one. And I kind of have to admire its audacity. show less

A hijacked commercial airliner, stuck in a holding pattern, high above Dallas International, for….20 years. How the beleaguered passengers cope is a revelation. A man learns his best friend has just bought a beer-drinking unicorn, from a shady, Chinese street vendor and keeps it in a pen in his yard. These are just a couple of the wonderful, slightly bent, magically surreal stories in this collection. There are werewolves, clowns, zombies, hit men and yes, there is a miniature wife as show more well, which brought back fond memories of the camp Sci-Fi classic “The Incredible Shrinking Man“, although this wife is very pissed and ready to do battle.
Gonzales is an impressive talent and he delivers his prose in a straight-forward manner, with dead-pan humor, fresh imagination and genuine love for his off-beat and mostly desperate characters. This was another recent E.R. gem. I have been very lucky with my last several acquisitions. show less