Tim Wenzell’s
Velvet Shipwrecks
is a collection of short stories characterized by the unexpected detour, the stops along a narrative way that take the reader into a marginal America, where surprises happen and are cast in a dark humor that paradoxically lights our way.  Consider “Check Point,” where the entire Wolrath family is arrested for drunkenness—including a sixteen-year-old son “was fed sips of wine in the middle of the fair grounds for five hours by his mother” and “Annie, barely ten,” who kicked the officer’s shins as the father, sober, attempted to pass his sobriety test.  Consider, too, the dark “Downstream,” and the funeral of the narrator’s brother—shot in the head by a man wearing steel-toed boots. Or consider “Y,” the story of a misread ultrasound and a father who “jumped the gun, went out to the Wal-Mart and decorated his soon-to-be-baby-boy’s nursery with baseballs and footballs.” Of course, “The fetus...emerged a girl,” and “Ted’s dream of coaching a son was dashed.” Indeed, Wenzell’s stories are moody and uneasy, but they are simultaneously delightful.