Are we not men?

The B-movie in the title story is the 1932 classic Island of Lost Souls. Charles Laughton plays a sadistic scientist whose experiments in the House of Pain have turned a tropical island's wild animals into a tribe of beast-men. Laughton tries to strengthen his piteous creations' tenuous grip on humanity by leading them in pep rallies. Their eyes frantic with a hunger for conviction and approbation, the beast-men repeat the refrain, "Are We Not Men? Are We Not Men?" You don't know if you should laugh or cry. Spencer's stories make you do both. In a review of his first novel, The Lost Son, Kirkus declared that Spencer "achieves what most debut writers merely attempt: He gives personal experience universal meaning and makes small-town tragedy profound." Whether the setting is a failing farm, a prison yard, a leaky apartment complex, or an overflowing canal in Venice, these thirteen stories offer the full range of Spencer's gifts, establishing him as a master of the form and one of our finest comic writers. No one else could make a B movie not only profound, but profoundly, achingly funny. All of Spencer's characters painstakingly construct their own Houses of Pain. They, too, are yearning for conviction and approbation, seeking the defining moments of their lives, "victims and perpetrators of a patriarchy in flux," as Marly Swick describes them. A few stories echo The Lost Son in their devastating yet redemptive depiction of blue-collar angst; others are exotic, urban, even urbane. What they share is Spencer's ability to make us care passionately about men and women fumbling with their self-delusions and self-discoveries, lost souls learning to do the best they can with the beast within.