Dense, but not heavy ... Bertino is a very funny writer ... Verge[s] on precious, but the prose is photorealistic enough to neutralize the taste of sugar ... When a short story works, it can wield truly occult powers, exerting a force disproportionate to its dimensions. Through all of Exit Zero Bertino blurs the line between writer and magician ... Dazzling ... Few writers can revolve your mind in the space of four words. Bertino is one of them.
A master class in book structure. At its core are the small, quirky details we all either pick up or drop in the course of a day, rising to the struggles between and within ourselves that we depend on to stay vital ... Within these stories is a deep understanding that the things we do to stave off the madness of life ... Has a spontaneous and intense energy ... Nothing is clear, and yet the ending feels, somehow, right—rather than handing itself off easily.
In Exit Zero, a collection of stories of both strange and magical, Marie-Helene Bertino mostly sidesteps these perils with a light touch and jaunty American style ... The sheer range of invention, perspective, and style on display in this collection makes it a complete and satisfying whole, full of distinct characters and vivid atmospheres that linger in the mind.
These are stories in which the strange is never questioned, only interacted with; sometimes embraced, and often initially ignored until it cannot be shunned anymore. The whimsical is the vehicle that propels the initial plot, but it is what these devices reveal about the true natures of and relationships between the characters that drives the narrative. The fantastical is used to explore existence, connectivity, loss, love, loneliness, joy, grief, and more ... It is a style that works so consistently because Bertino has a knack for infusing even her most uncanny and surreal of stories—and in this collection, every story contains an inherent unnerving, even the most upbeat and wholesome ones—with an at-times almost bludgeoning emotional heft (one that is often all the more potent because of an element of surprise) ... there is something wondrous in each story, a reverence for life, death, everything in between and beyond.
In her short stories, Marie-Helene Bertino transforms banalities into the breathtakingly surreal ... As she did in her novel Beautyland, Bertino quietly injects magical realism into her writing, creating a vibration between daily tedium and a vast imagination. Her protagonists are regular people dealing with extraordinary situations. Rather than dramatizing the unreal phenomena, or drawing attention to how bizarre the situation is, she introduces the absurd in the same way she might describe making a pot of coffee. It provides a sort of delightful catharsis for the mind to come up with transportive scenarios without needing to justify their existence or mechanisms.
Rooted in a profoundly earthy tenderness for the human condition ... With winsome wildness, capturing the uncapturable, Bertino offers up marvels on every page.
Potent and darkly funny ... Delightfully bizarre ... Each story is driven by energetic pacing, quick wit, and surprising twists. Bertino once again displays her formidable talent for the uncanny.
Ardently whimsical, yet never centerless—solid stories about our tenuous times ... Twelve stories that slide into the magical while staying determinedly real ... Comfortable vessels for readers’ experiences of feeling adrift in a world that admits to no defining beginnings and no definitive ends. Even if the reader’s world does not include unicorns, semisentient balloons, or ex-lovers falling from the sky, it is a good bet the characters who experience these travails will remind us of our neighbors, our friends, even ourselves as we navigate their worlds in Bertino’s confident hands.
