Short story collections rarely make it very far in the publishing industry. Often they are used as a way for a novelist to fill out the back end of a three-book deal or to clean out their backlog of unpublished work. Occasionally they scrap the bottom of the best-seller lists, but other than that they get little, if any, notice. Yet such collections offer some of the best reading out there.
Portland-based writer Roger Margolis’ new book “Condition Red: Funny Stories for Scary Times,” might not be up there with the classic short story collections, but it does offer some pretty entertaining
material. It’s not just a collection of short stories, but also a deconstruction of various forms of written media, ranging from classified ads to obituaries to newspaper headlines to modern literature.
The book opens in fine fashion with a comic strip introduction narrated and illustrated by the author’s son, who describes the bitter, pathetic, foolhardy man he sees his father as. The book then moves on to “Iris,” the first of its scattered short stories. It details the life of a man who turns into a pillar of salt every time he sees his wife in the morning. The story is interesting in the gleeful absurdity Margolis injects into an already absurd premise, but he never explores the
logical possibilities of the situation. The story works once for its initial humor, but after that it only seems bland.
The book then flows through a wide range of social satires, including a transcript of an audio tape entitled “Martin Landau’s School of Philosophy and Life” — the author’s attempt to write a story on a computer for the first time, an ode to asphalt, a series of portentous horoscopes and various other items of absurdity.
Like any satire with such a broad range of attack, the jokes are pretty hit and miss. The “Tuesdays with Morrie” satire “Tuesdays with Hitler,” is a one-joke story that is milked for all it is worth, yet never really takes off, while the “Obituaries of the Rich and Famous” series suffers from being both too obvious and too topical. A dependence on current cultural references plagues much of the book, with a few jokes having already slipped past their sell-by date. The extended joke about a “Magnum P.I.” reunion feels hopelessly dated, as do the O.J. Simpson gags.
The short stories themselves are also a scattershot affair. “Tiny Bubbles,” the story of a man who finds a way to survive underwater after trying to drown himself, wants to seem profound but is instead awkward and ill-conceived. “Deus ex Machina,” the folksy story of a man and his horse, strains too much to make its point.
But among all the clutter lay some real gems, especially when Margolis turns his aim on literature itself. “The Role of Organic Vegetables in Unpublished Contemporary Fiction” is a hilarious take on the items that appear in publishing house slush piles, while “The Muse” is the pathetic tale of authorial hubris and how it leads to one man’s life falling apart.
The fake advertising inside the book is also an inspired touch, with such oddball inclusions as “Do you want to see me naked?” and “Do you hate yourself? For a small fee, we’ll hate you too.” But not all of the additional material works. The two collections of fake newspaper headlines, for example, come off as bland and obvious.
So while “Condition Red” is uneven, there is enough worthwhile material to keep the book entertaining. But it’s never a good sign when a 151-page collection feels like it could have used some cutting. Margolis should have collected more quality material before taking this to print, but as it is the book remains an engaging, if slim, reading experience.

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