Wasps at the Speed of Sound

Derryl Murphy's first collection of short stories has a great name: Wasps at the Speed of Sound. The stories measure up to the bizarre image. Things are just wrong in these stories, but we come upon them in media res, with the characters taking them in stride. Dodging wasps that can drill through the front porch is the sort of thing that Murphy's characters expect to get through on a bad day. Although the situations in most of the stories are bleak, the characters face them with a jaunty sort of fatalism that keeps them in action to the final sentence, occasionally terminating in a happy ending for the protagonist, at least, if not our planet. Earth gets done in often enough, in the book, to satisfy a whole choir of doomsayers, but the reader is insulated from the impact by the brash indifference of the often-jaded characters, making it bearable. Sharp bits still sting, now and then; where they poke through the superficial callousness: like the well-televised demise of the last lemur, interesting enough to draw an alien to observe it, but still not enough to make us wise up and stop trashing our irreplaceable inheritance. Murphy's stories are a strange collection of barbed allsorts, that won't please all palettes, but come in an interesting selection of flavors with tart twists to please jaded taste buds.