The Museum of Ordinary People

Lewis Turco's The Museum of Ordinary People (Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, September 2008) includes stories on several topics, and has a variety of themes, but the common thread that runs through them all is to “expect the unexpected.”

Beginning with “The Prison,” which is from an unusual vantage point that may only be obvious at the end of the story, continuing on to “One Sunday Morning” in which a mother keeps a promise she gives her daughter, but one may wonder if this the kind of promise that should even be kept, through to The Museum of Ordinary People, the title story, which bears the signature eerie undercurrents in store for the reader in every story in the collection. The final story, “Pleasant Dell,” gives the collection a sort of completeness, and yet at the same time may leave you wishing for more.

The endings of the stories are what often give rise to the sense of strangeness. At times, they seem sudden, abrupt. You may expect the story to continue, or expect the events to be explained, but you are left to decide for yourself what really happened. A good example of such a story is “The Man in the Booth.” I'm still trying to work this one out in my head, but it was a good read.

I think this makes every reader's opinion of what happened and why slightly different, and helps make each story unique. Multiple readings of the same story can leave you considering different angles and different meanings the story could have.

As a whole, the book really is a Museum of “Extra”-Ordinary People, whose lives seem strangely similar to our own, if never quite.

—Jessica Becker