The Unsettling. Peter Rock

      I’ve long had an interest in Peter Rock’s work, though we didn’t actually meet in person until 2014. I first heard of him seventeen years earlier, when a former teacher passed along Rock’s first novel, This Is the Place, to me, along with a note reading, “Hey, you’re from Utah. Is this really what it’s like over there?” That novel, about a lonely aging blackjack dealer in Wendover who becomes obsessed with a young woman from Bountiful, Utah, and about where this obsession leads him, did, surprisingly enough, strike me as being a pretty accurate depiction of the West as I knew it. It illustrated splendidly the sometimes-awkward juxtaposition of different, clashing cultures (Mormons, Basque sheep farmers, Nevada gambling, religious cults, libertarians, etc.) that so characterize the intermountain West and which so few writers actually get right. Rock showed a deep understanding and appreciation of the weirdnesses that seem to accrue in the part of the world we both grew up in.

      Rock’s other novels move farther afield. When his second book, Carnival Wolves, was published in 1998, I got asked to review it by Sunstone, a magazine for dissident Mormons, probably because they’d heard it had Mormon polygamists in it. But it doesn’t just have polygamists: it’s a book that operates as a road trip across the country, moving from New York to LA, stopping at a lot of odd places in between—kind of like what Andrei Codrescu’s movie Road Scholar might have been if it was a book and had, in addition to an odd assortment of characters, a plot and a meticulous structure. Other of Rock’s books are set, say, in Philadelphia among seemingly troubled youths, on the streets of Portland, Oregon, in the hidden areas of a nature preserve, or, most recently, in The Shelter Cycle, among the detritus of the collapsed cult known as The Church Universal and Triumphant. But wherever they’re set, we find Rock gravitating toward those voices and bodies that exist along the margins of a given culture. Rock has an intense curiosity about such people, and one of the most remarkable things about his fiction is how nonjudgmental it is. He’s much more interested in understanding why some people take the weird and peculiar paths they end up taking, in elucidating their logic and thinking, than in telling us what we should think of them.

      Perhaps the novel is the form that most readily allows for such an exploration, but Rock is an exceptionally able writer of short fiction as well, and I have an especial fondness for his stories. He has only published one collection of short stories, The Unsettling, the book you’re holding now. It contains thirteen stories (only a fraction of the stories that Rock has published in magazines over the years), each of them carefully chosen to resonate in sometimes curious and surprising ways with the others. I find myself not wanting to say much specifically about the individual stories, since I think a good part of their fun is in their particulars, but I will say that the same interest in outsiders figures here as well, the same interest in elucidating a sometimes mad and questionable logic. Indeed, initially you might think that these stories pursue the same project as Rock’s masterful novels. But in the short form, these same concerns lead to something slightly different: reality becomes more deliberately fluid, the fantastic extrudes into the real. Things get strange