Within Bennett Sims’ Other Minds and Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio) you’ll find several stories about a variety of psychologically interesting narrators. The one thing that brings them together: they’re all quite bizarre.
Sims’ writing is at its strongest when a story’s movement and narration flow hand-in-hand seamlessly. A story that embodies this well is “Unknown,” in which the narrator grows scared that constant calls from unknown phone numbers are scams, spyware or the secret lover of his wife. This story starts in medias res with our narrator meeting a strange woman who needs to use his cell phone at the mall, and propels itself forward through his growing paranoia.
Of the longer stories, this is perhaps my personal favorite of the collection. In fact, this story and another titled “Pecking Order” offer fascinating character studies of their narrators’ inner mind — with the latter being downright disturbing (trigger warning for animal death/slaughter; I was not prepared).
Another piece I particularly enjoyed was “Other Minds,” where, once again, technology and the narrator are in a sort of conversation with each other. This one focuses on ebook readers and the narrator’s parasocial relationships with other reviewers, where “[t]he idea that he was the only reader in the world underlining precise descriptions frightened him.” I don’t think I’ve ever read a story about an ebook reader, so that alone sold me, on top of the narrator’s cohesive self-reflection and anxiety.
Other pieces in this collection have accompanying photos with them, which offer an actual visual so we can fully imagine what Sims’ narrators are referencing and reflecting on. This was at its strongest in the first piece, “La ‘Mummia di Grottarossa.’” Here, we’re shown the hall of ancient marble statues in the photo and read about the coffin of a girl: “today, living children crowd around this coffin, taking photos with their phones … They can tell that this girl, despite the two millennia condensed in her, is closer to them in time.”
A few stories in the collection are formatted as one long paragraph. While it is certainly a stylistic choice, it doesn’t always pay off like it does in the title story. It’s easy to get lost in the inner ramblings of our different narrators when it comes to longer stream-of-consciousness pieces like “Portonaccio Sarcophagus” and “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.” They offer some nice satire, but operate more like extended character studies than plot-driven stories.
All in all, Sims presents an interesting collection of psychologically unnerving stories with unreliable narrators galore. If you’re in the mood for a more heady read, this one will be right up your alley.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2023 issue.
