In the prologue to this collection, the author explains that what lies beyond is “an absurd recounting of my nonsensical life presented with the intent of making you smile.” There follows a whirlwind of pieces featuring Zeebo. “Country Fried Gizzards” finds him eating at a diner with fellow traveling musicians as he waxes about the oddities of Southern cuisine. “The Year of the Goat” chronicles a relationship with a woman named Chloé; she is beautiful but insists on “complete domination over everything and everybody she allowed into her life.” In “Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo,” Zeebo is in Colorado. His plan is to get stoned while on a layover, but he winds up getting a little too high for his own good. “Ode to Redneck Pete” is a character sketch about Zeebo’s neighbor Pete, a man who likes to use alliterative phrases like “sleazy old slime slut.” The longest piece, “The Blueberry Society,” follows a teenage Zeebo on a quest for love during a strange adventure in upstate New York. The stories run wild with whimsy and off-color humor; in “Christmas and the Art of Curling,” Zeebo, while tripping on acid, decides to “yank out every pubic hair” he has with tweezers. In one of the funniest scenes, while Zeebo is trying to avoid Chloé after a breakup, he remarks that he “felt more in control even though [he] continued crawling around on the floor” as he found himself “reduced to a paranoid reptile.” There are portions in which not much happens; “The Blueberry Society” includes mundane observations, like someone remarking, “That’s an osprey looking for a snack.” Still, the story includes more emotional content than the reader might initially expect—Zeebo is even reduced to tears as he imagines another character’s “hopeful vision of a future.” Taken altogether, Zeebo’s adventures are delightfully rife with the unexpected.
