What’s most impressive, reading it, is how naturally and perfectly the mammoth fits into the narrative’s contemporary reality, and how much the story depends on the presence of the mammoth — separated from her mate and offspring by space and time — to explain what has happened to the characters and their modern family ... It will be tempting, but hard, for readers to choose a favorite among the stories here ... The stories have that merry, postmodern humor, but also a classical love of real human emotion ... It seems one of the things a writer is doing in developing a voice is working out a careful calibration between the imagination and the world it encounters and attempts to understand ... In Pierce’s work, there is a deep marriage between the two, a vital connection and a natural partnership.
'Shirley Temple Three' is one of the most touching and original stories in Hall of Small Mammals, a debut collection that reads like the work of a much older, established fiction master. The stories in Pierce's book explore the ordinary in the otherworldly, the surreal in the mundane, and the results are stunning and unexpected ... Some of Pierce's stories have a bizarre, compelling mix of pathos and humor that recalls writers like George Saunders ... While Pierce has a real affection for the fantastic and the dreamlike, he shines even more brightly when writing about the prosaic ... The best story in the collection is 'Grasshopper Kings,' about a father and son attempting to bond at a camp sponsored by a Boy Scouts-like group ... There isn't a weak story in Hall of Small Mammals, and Pierce is an endlessly incisive and engaging writer. It's a book full of wisdom and emotion, with stories that explore what it means to live and die in a world filled with invisible things.
Other stories also gesture toward the pervasive unease we might note in this country. What makes a human 'human'? ... Clearly, Pierce has a fascination with science, and he has mined it thoroughly—to our advantage ... That said, some stories are weaker than others. A brief vignette about a mysterious skull raises some good questions about religion, but stops before it should, at least to my mind. And a story about a man with a somewhat bratty child in his care appears, still, to be in draft form; in my view, it seems not to have an urgent reason for existing ... These are minor qualms, however. The first story, along with 'Felix Not Arriving' (about a flawed comic), and a short account of several hours in a cult-like Boy Scouts-esque camp, more than merit the price of admission ... This young writer is one to watch.
Thomas Pierce's debut collection, Hall of Small Mammals, taps the aquifer of Southern literature but blends in supernatural elements with a light, deft touch, echoes of García Márquez among the biscuits and magnolias. A praline sweetness glazes the surface of these stories, offset by the occasional bitter aftertaste. Pierce knows his people well, connecting their conflicts to a deeper narrative about the human condition ... Although these stories are suffused in whimsy, Pierce plumbs the darkness that laps at his characters' lives. He's particularly astute in his grasp of the ways men oppress each other, the joys and limitations of the father-son relationship.
Pierce is a classicist in fabulist’s clothing: He constructs fantastical conceits and intricate plots, and then places in them quotidian characters with profoundly human problems. The result is a collection of stories that are as wondrous and dazzling as the most imaginative fiction being published today, and as wrenchingly emotional as it sometimes is to just be alive ... The tension between faith and science—one type of understanding and another—is a seam stitching these stories together ... Radiantly imaginative, brilliant and unexpected, wry and moving and funny.
Pierce juxtaposes science and faith, and his stories show how they share a desire to explain and label the world ... Hall of Small Mammals is a skilled collection of explorations on what it means to believe. Pierce teases faith and science out into myriad scenarios, and highlights our principal desire to put our belief into worldviews that make sense of what we see. Each story is a journey into a different kind of observation. Hall of Small Mammals shows us that it might be our need to explain which makes us most human.
People get uncomfortably close to their primal tendencies in this debut story collection that highlights the quirky and uncanny ... Pierce’s stories feel like they’re set within spitting distance of George Saundersville and occupied by residents whose need for normalcy is complicated by the inescapable strangeness of our natures ... In 'More Soon,' the collection’s strongest story, a man awaits the delivery of his dead brother’s body, which has become entangled in the bureaucracy of an international crisis; Pierce finds the dark humor in officialese ('R has been declared a biological weapon. Will call with more after Thanksgiving') while exploring the more sober tension of seeking closure after loss ... A promising debut that studies hard-luck types from new and provocative perspectives.
Pierce's first short story collection is full of compulsively addictive and delightfully strange fare ... Each takes a mundane experience and adds an element of the extra weird ... Pierce's menagerie of colorful characters equally inspires and amuses. The book is expertly paced (there isn't a dud in this eclectic bunch) and many of the stories' endings—some sinister, some melancholic, others heartfelt—prompt momentary reflection, though thankfully not always in ways that are expected.
