Wouldn’t a better title have been Abandoned?  Or Deserted?  After all, those monikers imply the placement by one person of another into a situation of loneliness or isolation, danger or despair.  But Stranded?  You mean, as when the bus doesn't show up and you're left standing all alone on the corner, wondering just how on earth you're going to get to work by nine?

And then it hit me.  I realized suddenly as I pondered the tales within that the title really does capture the essence of these short, lively sagas.  The people/places/things we find in this collection were not at all relegated to their position by someone or something else acting upon them, but rather by the very vagaries of  life, by the actions--or, in some cases, the inactions--of a world unfolding around them, regardless of the results.

Take the Vampiress who yearns for more control, only to learn that the impossible has happened and the inevitable has been unleashed upon her.  She is in complete control of her life--until she finds out the hard way that she isn't.

Or the rock that thinks and reasons and feels as a human being.  An animate inanimate that seems doomed, regardless of its humanlike qualities, to remain a rock forever.

Or the Groundhog Day-like repetitive life of Virgil Marz.  Or Ted, the hospitalized patient who will never awaken again.  Or...well, you get my point.

All of these entities really are stranded, abandoned by the very life force that created them, to fend for themselves--or die trying.  And that is what makes this group of stories so inviting. 

It’s easy to conceive of people doing harmful and disengaging things to others; it’s more difficult to conceive of people winding up in precarious positions merely because of the luck of the draw, the turn of fate, or something even more esoteric and less comprehensible: the Spinning Wheel of Life. 

In Stranded, author Kimberly Raiser raises questions about the state of humankind, the delicate line between reality and fantasy, and the nebulous juxtaposition between life and death.  Her style is at times rough and unpolished; this is by no means a perfectly executed work of literature.  But everything within it rings true.  It is a comfortable book, filled with realistic reading, with clear, crisp, sharp, and witty dialogue illuminated by often simple and always effective imagery—a rarity in these days of short literature. 

In reading this book, I couldn’t help but think of the creativeness and fertility of the minds of short-story writers such as Kafka, O'Henry, and Barthelme.  Kimberly Raiser is an apprentice in their mold, and one can't help but wonder what remarkable fantasies remain inside of her, waiting to be unleashed.  The author is able to divorce herself from the strictures of bounded convention, something that far too many of today's writers of fiction are unable--or unwilling--to do.  The result is a work of boundless creativity and energy.

Stranded: Stories from the Edge of Infinity...

by Kimberly Raiser

Outskirts Press, Inc.

Paperback, $11.95

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars