Your Wildest dreams (Within Reason) by Mike Sacks

The first piece I remember reading by Sacks also opens his collection of—what? Humor essays? Fever dreams? Chronicles of unholy mistakes? “Whoops!” was originally published on McSweeneys.net in 2006, and if Facebook had been in your life back then it would have been posted to your wall. It’s told through a series of all-staff e-mails from a guy in accounts payable, beginning with an apology for sending his previous e-mail to everyone, instead of his friend Alex Stafford. But that e-mail apparently contained a couple of dozen images from the narrator’s “imaginary world” in which he’s photoshopped his coworkers’ faces onto the bodies of centaurs, unicorns and people “born with oversize ears.” He’s a talking horse.

Other pieces here keep a similar direct-address perspective. In “My Name Is Smokey,” a pooch publishes his own ad for a new owner, though it’s slowly revealed over the course of the ad that he needs a new owner because a demonologist has trapped Baalzephon, Leader of the Foot Soldiers for Hell’s Army, in Smokey’s body. “Just come and get me from the corner of Palmer and Landvale,” Smokey pleads. “You will know it because it’s the only house on the block that was recently swallowed up by the ground below.” In “Dear Mr. Pynchon,” a beginning writer asks the famous recluse to blurb his book and offers suggestions like, “If I were married to Rhon Penny…I would never leave him!”

Yes, the pieces in Your Wildest Dreams are funny, but something more emerges when they are read cumulatively. There’s a nervous energy running through the pieces, a seriousness that seems to be satirizing the weakness of satire.