Hall of Small MammalsBy Thomas PierceRiverhead, 2015Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals reads like a menagerie. One story features a dwarf mammoth, another white snow frogs with glowing blue eggs, another a parakeet named Magnificent. In this debut, Pierce interweaves unexpected creatures with the mundane world. Each creature, and the events that unfold around it, hint at just enough of the extraordinary to keep the reader on edge. It’s that blend of ordinary and strange that makes each story in Hall of Small Mammals captivating, and makes the collection a success.Pierce’s writing is straightforward and casual—he makes it easy for readers to see what’s going on in his characters’ heads. The characters themselves are calm, take everything in stride, and aren’t stumped by surreality. In the first story, “Shirley Temple Three,” Mawmaw’s son Tommy comes home with an extinct species of dwarf mammoth riding in the back of his truck. He works on a television show that brings animals back from extinction by cloning their fossilized DNA, but sometimes the show’s scientists clone twins by mistake. Instead of euthanizing the twin mammoth as ordered, Tommy asks Mawmaw to keep it in her yard for a few months. She says yes, and closes it in the dog pen. Later, she regards the situation matter-of-factly:

The mammoth shuffles to the back of the pen, on the other side of which is a stretch of woods. Sometimes the deer emerge from those woods to eat the small green apples when they fall. Shirley Temple Three might like to see that, she thinks, and then takes a final drag of her menthol. Tommy says that the mammoth is from the late Pleistocene. It’s been yanked out of its own time and lives outside God’s natural laws.

Mawmaw’s unruffled attitude persists in regards to the mammoth, but she begins to see her son as the immoral, indifferent person he’s grown to be, the person who takes advantage of everyone around him, the “outline of a man” instead of one with substance.The same receptiveness to the surreal is found in almost all of Pierce’s characters. In “The Real Alan Gass,” Claire confesses to her husband Walker that in her dreams she’s married to someone else. The dreams don’t feel like dreams, but like a real, complete, separate life—the other man isn’t “other,” but a different and wholly authentic husband. At first Walker is jealous and tries to stamp out Claire’s dreams altogether, but the story ends with acceptance: “The message is, Let’s be happy, and that feels like the right decision, a conscious decision to be happy.” He decides to absorb the weirdness he encounters and to live with it.The husband and wife in “Saint Possy” have a brush with the surreal when they find an unidentifiable animal skull in their attic. The skull is an amusing trinket to the wife, but not to the husband, who feels as though it’s watching them. The wife eventually agrees, and the couple smashes the skull in a moment of primitive violence. They later sell their house, and when they unpack in their new home they notice a sliver of smashed skull at the bottom of a box. Without discussion, they both accept that the shard must be returned to the first house. The decision is irrational—there’s no logical explanation as to why the skull should be returned—but they reach that conclusion as though it’s the most natural one in the world.One of the strongest stories in Hall of Small Mammals is “Grasshopper Kings,” which originally appeared in The Missouri Review. In the story, Flynn, a hopelessly out-of-touch father, tries to connect to his young son, Ryan. He forces the issue when he insists they go on a campout with the Grasshoppers, a sort of Boy Scouts complete with merit beads and rituals.Flynn is a typical concerned suburban dad, but his musings are endearing rather than exasperating. Through them we see true concern for his son and his struggle to connect:

Does Flynn work too much? Does he not pay the boy enough attention? Should they be playing more catch? Does the boy need hobbies?...Is the boy bored? Is it a feeling of boredom? Is it a feeling of not belonging? When he looks inside his heart, does he see clouds or sunshine? Is that how the doctor put it?

“The boy” is how Flynn refers to his son, but by the story’s end it’s “his boy” and his name, Ryan. Something about the campout makes his son’s personhood evident to Flynn, whether it’s the characteristic way he makes tunnels in his mashed potatoes, or how he builds a T-shirt throne for his stuffed bear every night.Just as fascinating as Flynn’s growing awareness of Ryan is his growing awareness of the social hierarchy that is suburban fatherhood:

Inside every group, he decides, there are more groups. Circles within circles, and inside of those, more circles still, all of them infinitely divisible. You could spend your whole life wondering which ones you’re in and which ones you’re not and which ones really want you and which ones are holes that have no bottom.

In the last line of the story, he seems to impart this wisdom to his son. “‘Do you want to hear a truth?’” he asks.Pierce’s longest and most complex story, “Videos of People Falling Down,” is also his most memorable. The premise is based on YouTube videos—Pierce writes hypothetical titles for hypothetical video posts that show people falling in various situations: in elevators, into zoo habitats, down stairs, into glass walls… In some cases bystanders film the incidents, and in some cases Big Brother captures the footage via traffic or security cameras.Then Pierce takes the incidents and interweaves their characters. In one, a man named Marshall runs into the glass wall of an enclosed ATM and falls; he’s distracted because his wife has just left him. In a story near the end, the wife meets a famous singer who has just face planted in the middle of a show (“Celebrities Fall Too So Funny—Beyoncé Carmen Electra Simon Punch and More”). But in a story in the middle, a female author is watching the news, and Marshall is on trial for the singer’s murder. Nothing is chronological, but everything is connected. It takes lots of marginalia to get it all straight.As Pierce clearly spells out, the story is a meditation on interconnectivity and lack of control:

Falling down has never been the same. Now we can watch the same fall a hundred times.... We can see the birth of fear and panic in a human face. We can identify the moment when a person suddenly realizes that he is no longer in control of what happens next. But the simple truth is that we are never in control of what happens next. Falling down is the universe being honest with you, finally. It’s life as it really is.

Falling connects us, and is a means to empathize with others. When we watch someone else fall, by our own experience we’re falling too. Even if the event is isolated, surveillance makes it universal and eternal.In an interview for The New Yorker, Pierce said that he’s fascinated by “situations in which people have to let go of something—a self, an idea, a history, a belief, a system of thought, a desire, a relationship—in order to confront the world as it is, or, maybe, even to see beyond the world as it is.” It’s no surprise, then, that falling becomes a metaphor for realization, or that so many of his characters experience huge mental shifts and revelations.In truth, Pierce’s entire collection is about interconnectivity. The characters in them also overlap, although not as completely as those in “Videos.” For instance, Ellie, the main character in “Why We Ate Mud,” has a friend named Mary. Mary is the main character in “Amplexus,” the last story, and her boss is Bert from “More Soon.” David-Mitchell-esque degrees of separation abound.In keeping with its name, Hall of Small Mammals also very literally explores human evolution. The stories are rife with allusions—everything from references to the Paleolithic Age to Neanderthals to ancient burial rights. Many stories feature fossils or skeletons or reference religion. That evolution and religion are examined side by side is no accident; Pierce uses both to remind us of our ancient roots and to reiterate that, in the grand scheme of time, our personal stories are too small to make a difference.But despite their impotence, personal stories matter—Pierce makes this clear in his relentless telling of them. And by the same token, he hints that they are more than they appear. By including surreal elements, he hints that even the most mundane story contains a hint of fantasy.His last story, “Amplexus,” ends with the two main characters watching the stolen home videos of another family. It seems they’ll stop after the first video…until one character chooses a new tape from the pile and presses play.. They sit in the dark watching someone else’s life, as though unable to resist the lure of what might unfold. The strangeness inherent in everyday life draws them into the lives of others, just as the reader is drawn into these characters’ lives, unable to look away.____Claire Landsbaum is a Master’s student at New York University and an editorial intern at New York magazine