I Am Dangerous: Stories
Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1996
Abstract
This collection of stories explores its characters' varied and often problematic discovery of strong emotional attachments. Most of the stories depict ordinary people in quiet suburban or rural settings and address common bonds, from family relationships to high-school romances and friendships. In many cases, the catalysts for the discovered emotional attachments are explosive and violent acts or conditions: a brother angrily seeking to murder his mentally handicapped uncle; a schoolboy imagining the bloody stoning of an obsessively pious and aloof classmate; an embittered father angrily shaking his son out of a tree to the damaging hard ground below; a professor's paranoid, hallucinatory spells and blackouts at parties and meetings as he struggles with confusing images of a boyhood desire. Sometimes these stories show such discoveries being embraced or even romanticized, but more often, they dramatize a refusal or inability to adequately integrate emotional discoveries, and with their many scenes and images of real or imagined violence, suggest the potential dangers of such a failure.