Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
Kevin Wilson
In Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. ‘Grand Stand-In’ is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies ‘stand-ins’ for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in ‘Blowing Up on the Spot’, a young man works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after his parents have spontaneously combusted.
Laced with humour and pathos, the wonderfully inventive stories in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.
INTERVIEWS and REVIEWS
Sydney Morning Herald: What to read now
andTunneling to the Center of the Earth
‘Kevin Wilson’s stories show us a world that is both real and full of illusion…He forces us to look at our own lives in a new and slightly off-kilter way.’
‘These superb, often audacious stories rework the ordinary into surreal yet hauntingly plausible worlds, and we emerge seeing ourselves with fresh, if somewhat nervous, clarity.’ Ben Fountain
‘Acute and uniformly unsettling, these fictions explore themes of loss and loneliness with fresh young insight, and occasionally with a faint rainbow at the end.’
‘[A] lively, inventive book…Wilson offers fabulous twists and somersaults of the imagination.’
‘A Southern writer with a bent sense of humor offers a fine debut collection of stories, some unlike anything you’ve read before. Wilson displays a marvelous sense of narrative ingenuity…Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts: new ideas.’
‘[A] captivating debut collection…fresh and darkly comedic.’
‘All the stories in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth are lush with imagination, humanity, and wit.’
‘Wildly imaginative [and] warmly compassionate…[Wilson] creates an appealing voice for each first-person narrator he invents, and in third person, he is flat-out magisterial, with more than a hint of the magical.’
‘Wildly imaginative [and] warmly compassionate…[Wilson] creates an appealing voice for each first-person narrator he invents, and in third person, he is flat-out magisterial, with more than a hint of the magical.’
‘The stories have a delicious and unpredictable black comic sensibility to them, often with complex emotions squirming towards expression underneath.’
‘With dark humour, wild inventiveness and an affecting understanding of where, in the human heart, it hurts, [Wilson] creates strange worlds that cast reflection on our own.’
‘The beauty of these stories is that the characters and plotlines linger in the memory, sometimes for their pure oddity, but more often because of the gentle humour and pathos infused into the writing. Here is a writer of exceptional skill with a fondness for the flaws and frailties of humanity.’
‘Kevin Wilson has an unmatched eye for the absurdity of human behaviour…It’s tender and hilarious and sweet.’
