I'd Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You, and Other Stories

January 9, 2023
Baggott (Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders) delivers a moving fantastical collection. In “Nest,” a teenager is overcome with guilt over her mother’s suicide and haunted by her mother’s ghost, who has a bird’s nest for a jaw. In “The Knock-Offs,” people obsessed with celebrities create children using stolen DNA from their favorite stars. Baggott structures the story as a series of letters to the actor Bradley Cooper, in which the narrator, Cooper’s biological daughter, begs Cooper to help her mother avoid prison time for stealing his DNA. “The Gaslighter’s Lament” features AI robots designed to gaslight people at the behest of customers. Things go sideways after one of the robots turns the tables on its client. In “Inkmorphia,” a woman’s memorial tattoo to her brother won’t stop changing its shape and placement, driving her to look deeper into the cause of his death and her repressed memories of the event. The title story features a woman who falls in love in a support group for people who have been banned from dating apps after their “dating credit” score was “dinged” by exes. Though the narrators’ voices tend to bleed together, Baggott does a commendable job of exploring their grief and loneliness through the stories’ strange phenomena. This is stacked with feats of imagination.