The phrase "movie star" connotes an unattainable being, so distant and awe-inspiring that it shares a name with a celestial body. In Jack Pendarvis's story collection, the focus instead is on the normal mortals who orbit these icons, whose trials and tribulations are as absurd as they are unglamorous.
Movie Stars' primary appeal lies in its deviation from and playfulness with conventional ways of storytelling. With abrupt interjections, bizarre plot twists and anticlimaxes, Pendarvis, who writes for the TV show Adventure Time, imbues his characters with hilarious quirks and outlandish flaws. The gullible protagonist of "Cancel My Reservation" falls for a friend's lie that he has cancer, then proceeds to search for the perfect gift at a Bob Hope paraphernalia auction; the son in "Frosting Mother's Hair" dates a gold-digging B-list actress and severely burns his mother's scalp in a hapless dye job. Most entertaining, though, are Pendarvis's sentences, the lovechild of Mad magazine and Proust. In "Your Cat Can Be a Movie Star," the narrator observes of Scarlett Johansson, "[she] is a person so soft and creamy, resembling nothing so much as a nourishing bowl of oatmeal."
With its focus on human foibles, Movie Stars manages to be both dark and winsome, humorous and heartbreaking. Beneath the absurdity, these characters' failures sometimes hit too close to home. It's a pain that hurts so good, a distorted mirror in which reality is both funnier and more heightened than the world we know. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer