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Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever
The title of Taylor’s debut story collection appears as graffiti throughout the book. In the opener, “Amber at the Window in Hurricane Season,” someone has spray-painted the slogan on a sidewalk. And it appears scrawled above the door of a coffee shop in the final, “Whistle Through Your Teeth and Spit.” The characters view the statement cynically—in “Amber” the narrator classifies the tagger as “some genius,” and in “Whistle” it suffers from guilt by association, showing up below another tag: PUNX NOT DEAD ITS SLEEPING.
Taylor seems to share the same cool regard, or at least thinks of it ironically as a slogan for his stories. Most of his characters are well aware of their less-than-best circumstances, pining for girls who don’t pine back, or stuck in the psychic quicksand of small towns. In the book’s best offering, “In My Heart I Am Already Gone,” Kyle is bluffing his way through community college when his uncle Danny asks him to kill the family cat. It’s not clear why Danny doesn’t do it himself, but Kyle assumes it’s because he wants plausible deniability. But the reader knows Danny sees a deviant streak in his nephew that Kyle is blind to.
To return to that title for a second, it’s important to note the humor in it. In “Whistle,” the protagonist has exactly nothing that he wants: The friend he wants as his girlfriend keeps her distance, he’s a great guitar player with a regular gig in a Grateful Dead cover band, and his neighborhood has gentrified beyond recognition. Still, there’s something of a frustrated chuckle at play, which is how Taylor manages to avoid that cynicism and imbue his characters with that slight glimmer of hope.
