Brautigan meets Bachelard meets Twilight Zone: Zach VandeZande’s collection of vignettes into other worlds is whimsical, surreal, and eerily familiar. The stories are both nightmares and fabulous dreams I feel as though I have relived hundreds of times over but can never remember. Questions that I have yet to ask myself but have been sitting and waiting in some cavern of my brain. The whole book reads like a daydream, and keep in mind that “Nothing that happens here is important. Important is elsewhere. . . . This place is meant for in-between.” Liminal Domestic Stories stands on a beautiful threshold between the mundane and the utterly alien.

VandeZande’s use of bodily personification throughout is endearing. Things on and about the body that already have agency in our world, but not this much agency. A tearful wound; a scab with social awareness. He speaks about the souls of pains as if they are impossibly autonomous from the body and the self, as if they are the things in control of everything:

whisper into her wound, and in this way they were absolved. The wound would never close, not all the way. There was just too much of it, a jagged hole at her side packed with gauze and weeping. . . . He didn’t know about the pain in her, electric and growing.

In another vignette, "Interrogation," abrasive one-liners and attention to the human condition are everywhere. VandeZande writes with fervor in an attempt to communicate his message with us and it’s crucial. He tackles topics that grapple with masculinity, family dynamics, existentialism, identity dysmorphia, and, of course, love. It’s melancholic and cerebral, nailing the head of adoration on everything bittersweet:

In telling you all this, I am trying to say something profound about love and my behavior. . . . I’d ask why I’m not a victim, why the world is so eager to move a man out of that category when he’s alive like everyone and hurt like everyone and struggling like everyone and going to be one day an object in the ground like everyone.

He has a tendency to ultra-personify the already human characteristics, pushing the idea of the body and the mind, and what that even means, to the extreme. Although his stories are fantastical, they are rooted in core concepts of existence, the way we view the world, and how we choose to move through it.

VandeZande’s add-to-dictionary prose brings us all the more closer to what we have all been trying to say but didn’t know how to say. You don’t know what you’re feeling until he tells you that he’s also been feeling that way all along. He navigates emotions simply, sometimes just stating the clear-cut opposite of a feeling but doing so in a way that you had never thought about before. The answer is right under your nose. VandeZande says so much without saying a whole lot. It’s not a matter of florally dressed language, but rather a matter of when and how to say it, even when that means using words that seem real but aren’t. From "Nighthawk," we gain a better grasp on his simplicity and the weight of it:

she saw that she could not be unhappy. Which is nothing at all like happy. . . .

Somewhere a vessel being made unwhole. . . .

But who has ever been whole. . . .

Three things she loves about being alive:

That coffee gets cold. That dawn comes on. That a different now is on the way.

There are prescribed limitations of the physical mind and body and also how to supersede them, and we experience the assertion and acceptance of this throughout this particular narrative:

There are some things a body can do, and some things a body cannot do. . . . The sum of these two types of things together is called a person. . . .

realize that you are only your body, or realize that you are not just your body . . . just ride the wave, live through this and then this and then this and guess what: now you’re living, present tense and actual. Now you’re now.

A body is still a vessel when it holds only itself.

VandeZande leads us through a sensitive whirlwind of future, past, real, not real and, in the end, leaves us wondering how the hell we have come this far without thinking about any of it. We are left to decipher whether or not "belief is enough" and to "think about the ways that what [he] is telling [us] is happening," to "decide if that matters or doesn’t." If you want a book that you’ll dog-ear the hell out of, this is it.