"In these spare, understated tales, you wander heedlessly back and forth
across the boundary between reality and fantasy. Before you know it, life is bizarre.
And before you know it,you're laughing at the excesses of civilization, and at yourself."
--Faris Cassell, Eugene Register-GuardIn his second book of humorous tales, Jeffrey Shaffer takes the reader inside a boot camp for laundromat offenders, a right-wing private school, and a cold-cream testing site. He listens in on conversations with an alien, with a general in the midst of a national crisis and, most frightening of all, with an unborn daughter. He considers the what-ifs of catastrophes like an asteroid striking the earth, the collapse of the dollar, and the destruction of television. And he introduces such characters as insurance adjusters who follow the destructive path of Godzilla (See excerpt below), an "orthopractor" whose manipulations out-manipulate Hollywood, and a guy who's been frozen for years in Alaska. "Jeffrey Shaffer is -- not to put too fine a point on it -- hilarious.
Well, he is hilarious if your sense of humor has a slight warp -- or perhaps even a large woof -- to it.
... keen-edged and pointed rapiers, slicing and skewering sacred cows and modern sensibilities alike."
--Steve Perry, Portland Oregonian
"These stories are strange; some of them are laugh-out-loud funny--if the reader is
the type who 'gets' Far Side cartoons. ... [Shaffer] makes writing stories like this
look easy--an incredibly difficult task."
--Library Journal
But these thumbnail descriptions hardly give a clue about where Shaffer goes with his situations and characters. He is, above all, unpredictable. His humor is based primarily on surprise and a rich imagination, not repetition or overstatement. You won't find anything sophomoric, clever, or trendy here.
Shaffer's wildly imaginitive stories are told in calm prose, with twists and turns and a touch of pathos. They approach reality from a variety of angles, so that the oddest people and situations seem just the way things are, or will be.
$13.95 paper, 192 pp., illustrated, ISBN 0-945774-36-2
Order from your local bookstore via Book Sense
Click here to read two sample stories from It Came With the House,
or first try the excerpt from another story, below.
Our company car stopped in front of a pile of wreckage that had once been a hardware store. I swallowed nervously.
"You didn't think the first day on the job would be easy, did you?" quipped Bob Bugelman, my training supervisor. He grabbed his clipboard and slid out from behidn the steering wheel. The scene around us was like a surreal nightmare. A wise corridor of downtown Portland was pulverized.
Bob leaned back, took a deep breath, and smiled. "God help me, it's wonderful!" he beamed. "I love the smell of mass destruction in the morning!" Then he looked around sheepishly, realizing that some of the local citizens might be close by. "Sorry. Can't help it," he said, shaking his head but still grinning. "Godzilla is my weakness."
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