MONTHS AND SEASONS— is a short story collection that reveals its author, Christopher Meeks to be a superior writer and contemporary master of literary fiction. He is a keen observer of people with unique yet universal vulnerabilities: those we work with, those we went to school with, those we simply see in shopping malls, on public transit, at sporting events. But from Meeks’s pen and imagination, these ordinary people germinate terrific stories laced with Meeks’s classic philosophical humor.
In the opening story “Dracula Slinks into the Night” a married couple in a troubled marriage attends a Halloween party where the husband’s aversion to dancing leads to a fall and serious injury that mitigates their differences. “Why not dance?’” the narrator says. “We’re merely blobs of water and minerals procreating to create what? It was a world run over with gas-guzzlers and pollution and cattle prods for semen.”
“The Sun is a Billiard Ball” shows a nexus of two couples’ lives: one couple is dealing with the husband’s discovery of bloody stools while the other couple is facing the specter of HIV testing. The manner in which their lives intersect is one of the examples of the Chaos Theory.
In“The Holes in My Door” a recently separated man finds gunshot holes in his garage door, reacts by investing in his own gun, and shoots himself in the foot – much the way his bonding with his ex-wife (an obsession that colors all of his thoughts) was punctured by his own behavior.
There are other stories of infidelity and the remorse of cheating and regretting. The title story concerns movie extras and their cruising. Cody, the lead character, is looking for the perfect match (such as girls with names like Summer or May). “Cody believed in belief. He was like the late Danish philosopher Soren Kirkegaard, except he was working in America on a movie set with giant power cables and topless women. He and Soren were awed by faith. Cody couldn’t explain why he believed names were important, for example, but they were. He just knew. There were things beyond science.”
In “The Wind Just Right” Meeks we see a mother/daughter relationship that has more similarities, fears, and phobias than either understands. In “Breaking Water” we meet fashion model Merrill, post op for obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that changes her career options but delivers other opportunities. ‘”We’re just ‘beings toward death’, right? Martin Heidegger said we’re all looking for an authentic life before the inevitable happens. We’re supposed to face death and have a healthy anxiety towards it’.”
With deft humor Meeks offers his readers poignant views of ordinary lives. I highly recommend this book. It will probably lead you to want to read some or all of the other many books authored by Christopher Meeks.
