Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine: Stories

Kevin Wilson has been on my radar since publishing his short story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. The stories contained within were weird, funny, and brutally honest. I read it three times through before finally putting it down.

So my expectations were high when I opened Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, and I was not disappointed. Wilson displays the same deft hand in melding humor, loss, friendship, and loneliness in heartfelt, heartbreaking stories that soar well beyond their clever premises.

Girls at a sleepover film a horror movie. A widow welcomes home her wayward musician son. A troublesome woman loses herself in ice cube fights that embarrass her sister. An altar boy faints at the worst possible time, triggering an unexpected journey.

Each story allows for the protagonists to self-reflect, for the characters to interact in meaningful, believable ways, and for the reader to live vicariously through the characters, asking and answering the same questions about ourselves. Wilson manages to invest the reader in each and every tale with frightening ease.

Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine has emotional highs and lows, but the quality never dips once.