“I’ve had the weirdest day,” someone says near the end of one of the stories that make up Ben Pester’s giddying debut collection. They’re not wrong. Many of these tales read like Charlie Kaufman scripting an episode of The Office. In one called Orientation – a neat joke – an agency worker’s first-day “onboarding process” with a bumptious health and safety officer who says things like “Excellenté!” turns distinctly odd, as talk of lanyards and lunchtime options gives way to a sinister time slip that revives a difficult childhood memory.
Something similar happens in a story about a man who meets his father for a lunch at a restaurant, only to go to the toilet and return to find the restaurant has shut, with his father nowhere to be seen. Another piece turns on a disciplinary meeting in which someone is accused of emailing a colleague with an offensive slur – except she didn’t write it, and no one knows the word’s meaning anyway. Strangest of all is a story titled If Yes, Please Explain Your Answer, narrated by another office worker who finds himself turned into wadding to staunch a colleague’s flesh wound, sustained in circumstances that are weirder still. “Apart from my new physical state, life continues as usual... My children say they do not miss me too badly,” he tells us.
There’s a melancholy seam of emotion about family life here, as well as a keen eye for the absurdities of workplace culture. Pester’s frame of reference only heightens the surreality: when a man-eating black hole opens up in someone’s house, we’re told it stretches out its victims “like it was making pasta or something”. I’d guess he’s a fan of the bleakly comic bizarro-world scenarios of the American writers Ben Marcus and Donald Antrim. Like them, he sometimes takes the risk of dizzying us so much that we lose sight of the stakes involved amid the blizzard of weirdness, but on this evidence he’s got more than enough savvy to stay the right side of zany.
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Am I in the Right Place? by Ben Pester is published by UEA Publishing Project (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
