THIS IS THE AFTERLIFE

Jeff Chon

Sagging Meniscus, £17.99

 

When California-based Jeff Chon started writing his 2021 satire Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun, his initial instinct had been to ridicule the conspiracy theorists, Trumpists and incels who had red-pilled their way from the darkest corners of the Internet into the heart of mainstream discourse. In the process of researching and writing it, however, mockery gave way to empathy, and that change of heart informs this collection of 14 short stories, which explore a desolate emotional landscape where the only thing people seem to have in common is alienation.

The opening story, “P.A.L.A.D.I.N.”, revisits the moral panic over “Satanic Rock” records in the 1980s, told from the perspective of “a Korean kid who wishes he was [Depeche Mode’s] David Gahan". Following the attempted suicide of an Asian metalhead student, a local preacher organises a bonfire of LPs – beginning with those belonging to his own daughter. Other things teenagers have to put up with in these stories include a surreal campaign to raise their awareness of drunk driving, in which kids are pulled out of class and made up to look like corpses and a car crash is recreated on the sports field. What’s most jarring is not that community leaders are taking this ridiculous pantomime deathly seriously but that many of the kids are too.

Repeatedly, Chon comes back to probe the emotional wounds sustained at school that never heal (even after two decades, Elaine Chong can’t help but think in terms of jocks and preppies when she attends a reunion), and the intense relationships formed there which stagnate, reach their natural end or contained the seeds of their own breakdown from the beginning. “There’s No Connection Here” revisits the characters from the record-burning story to find its narrator turning his back on an old friend after service in Iraq has turned him into a paranoid survivalist. More disturbingly, in “All These Lives”, a perverse act committed by an old schoolfriend both foreshadows his eventual ritualistic suicide and turns out to have been the cause of the break-up between the narrator and his girlfriend years earlier.

Covering so many bases that the book would feel incomplete without it, “The Ruins” is an acknowledgement of the far-right’s incursion into geek culture, in which a comic-book store hosts a provocative competition to draw a picture of Mohammed, supposedly in the name of free speech.

Chon’s insightful and thought-provoking studies of the psyche of a country at odds with itself are generally conveyed in a laconic, detached narrative voice. But, for all its bleakness, the book’s patina of numb, ironic disengagement is deceptive. Most of the central characters are, like Chon, Korean-Americans whose experience of America has always been one of exclusion and whose perception of it has been shaped by constant slights and snubs. One of the standouts of this collection, “They Belong Here Now”, concerns the anguish of an American woman whose adopted Korean son has renounced his American citizenship, despite his prior military service, to settle with his wife and young son in Korea. It’s an accomplished and affecting story, binding together the personal and political themes found throughout the book.

Wrapping it all up is the elegiac, layered invocation of fatherhood, death and non-existence that is “This is the Afterlife”, a complex and poignant story that muses, “Maybe the stories we tell are just meant to stay voices in our heads, phantom languages that lose meaning once they travel from our mind to our lips.” In this case, though, it’s a good thing that they made the journey.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT