Tenth of December

Victory Lap opens the book on its most kinetic scene: Alison Pope, daydreaming through a running commentary of hypothetical suitors on her porch, is grabbed by a stranger posing as a meter reader, and saved only because Kyle Boot, the neighbor boy raised under his father's exhaustive list of household rules, breaks every rule he's ever followed to knock the man out with a decorative rock. Saunders splits the story into three tight close-third perspectives, Alison's, Kyle's, and briefly the attacker's own self-justifying interior voice, so the rescue reads as an argument about which characters the book trusts enough to think in run-on, undisciplined prose and which one it keeps controlled and clipped.

Escape from Spiderhead puts a prisoner named Jeff through a pharmaceutical trial run by a genial researcher named Abnesti, injecting him with drugs that can manufacture love, verbal eloquence, or crushing despair on command through a port wired into his side, and Saunders uses the sterile, brand-name language of the trial, Verbaluce, Darkenfloxx, to make consumer-product cheerfulness sound genuinely monstrous once it's applied to another person's mind.

The Semplica Girl Diaries, narrated entirely through a financially strapped suburban father's diary entries, imagines a status symbol built from real poverty: immigrant women from poorer countries, called SGs, volunteer to be strung together by a microline threaded through their brains and displayed on suburban lawns in exchange for money sent home, and Saunders lets the father's own guileless, grammatically strangled prose indict the whole arrangement more thoroughly than direct commentary could. The title story completes the pairing of dread and rescue running through the book: Don Eber, dying and planning to end things in the woods rather than let his family watch him decline, crosses paths with an overweight, friendless boy named Robin who falls through the ice on a nearby pond, and each man ends up saving the other, Robin's accident giving Eber's failing body one more use before it's used up.

Abnesti administers each drug with the chipper affect of a product demo, complimenting Jeff's vocabulary while he's dosed with Verbaluce, apologizing for the discomfort while he's dosed with Darkenfloxx, and Saunders keeps the register so consistently upbeat that the horror has to be assembled by the reader entirely from what the cheerful language is being used to justify.

Robin's fall through the ice happens because he's chasing a hat, a small, almost comic detail Saunders refuses to dress up as fate, and it's precisely that ordinariness, no grand coincidence, just a boy after a hat, that makes Eber's interrupted plan feel like rescue rather than narrative convenience.