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The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians
A pocket guide to the twenty-three most painful things in life, written by the most well-adjusted man in the universe.Does it make you sad to be alive?Boo-hoo. You're living all wrong.My name is Andersen Prunty. I'm happiest while napping. I am a man with tennis shoes. They get older every time I put them on. This is how I deal with the pain of being alive. Now is our chance to deal with our pain together. You'll thank me later.Lover and euphoria,Andersen :)
90 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 9, 2011
53 people are currently reading
486 people want to read
About the author
Andersen Prunty
51 books671 followersAndersen Prunty lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He writes novels and short stories. Visit him at notandersenprunty.com, where he posts a free story every Friday.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 63 reviews
October 4, 2018
Prunty tales take a little while to get going, and most of the stories in this collection are of the flash fiction strain - wham, bam, thank you reader. You're really just starting to get into it, and POOF! - it's all over. The best of the bunch is the title tale, and The Ohio Grass Monster, a story about two teenage boys wrestling in a backyard. There was nothing bizarro about this one, and it positively oozed sincerity and nostalgia. I loved it. I'd like to see a whole novel wrapped around these characters.
May 30, 2016
Why?????
Why did I even read this?
Okay, so that cover, and the title had me from the beginning. Probably so much that I ignored the bizarro fiction shelf. And these stories were pretty bizarre and disturbing. I am still trying to comprehend what I've read.
There were two though.
The Balloonman's Secret was kind of adorable, falling more into the magical realism/fantasy genre. Bob, the Balloonman has a thriving balloonstore, the go-to store when you needed ballons, whether for a wedding, a birthday party or a funeral. Until June First rushes into his store. Since then he can call himself a changed man.
In The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians we are given exactly that, guidelines and rules to the contest. Who can hit the most pedestrians wins.
Like Julia Roberts once said
Or I just read it wrong.
Read this for our May Short Story Month Marathon, a personal challenge during which Alex and I will be going through our short story collection in this last week of May. I'm adding a little twist to it by reading books by authors I haven't read from before.
Why did I even read this?
Okay, so that cover, and the title had me from the beginning. Probably so much that I ignored the bizarro fiction shelf. And these stories were pretty bizarre and disturbing. I am still trying to comprehend what I've read.
There were two though.
The Balloonman's Secret was kind of adorable, falling more into the magical realism/fantasy genre. Bob, the Balloonman has a thriving balloonstore, the go-to store when you needed ballons, whether for a wedding, a birthday party or a funeral. Until June First rushes into his store. Since then he can call himself a changed man.
In The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians we are given exactly that, guidelines and rules to the contest. Who can hit the most pedestrians wins.
"It goes like this. Every time a driver hits a pedestrian, he or she earns points. It’s very simple. A pedestrian is only safe when he or she is in his or her house or car."And on the last day of this particular round to rack up those points, our protagonist takes us along on his ride. Quirky, absurd, and actually hilarious. I mean...hitting pedestrians?
Like Julia Roberts once said
Or I just read it wrong.
Read this for our May Short Story Month Marathon, a personal challenge during which Alex and I will be going through our short story collection in this last week of May. I'm adding a little twist to it by reading books by authors I haven't read from before.
November 28, 2011
The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians is a collection of short stories by Andersen Prunty.
Andersen Prunty is swiftly becoming one of my favorite authors due to his versatility, something that is nicely illustrated in this short story collection. The stories contained within are absurd, hilarious, disturbing, thought-provoking, or a combination thereof.
There are twenty-three short stories in this collection and they're all very different. You get the tale of a driver in a gruesome game where you score points for hitting pedestrians, a man whose teeth leave his gums one day to go see the world, an architect building a skyscraper on his back, and a man who buys his favorite author at a bookstore. And those are just a few of the odd delights contained within.
If you're looking to give Andersen Prunty a shot, this is a good sampling of his work. Plus it will look good on your bookshelf.
Andersen Prunty is swiftly becoming one of my favorite authors due to his versatility, something that is nicely illustrated in this short story collection. The stories contained within are absurd, hilarious, disturbing, thought-provoking, or a combination thereof.
There are twenty-three short stories in this collection and they're all very different. You get the tale of a driver in a gruesome game where you score points for hitting pedestrians, a man whose teeth leave his gums one day to go see the world, an architect building a skyscraper on his back, and a man who buys his favorite author at a bookstore. And those are just a few of the odd delights contained within.
If you're looking to give Andersen Prunty a shot, this is a good sampling of his work. Plus it will look good on your bookshelf.
April 19, 2025
Fast and fun!
I could read Andersen Prunty's stories back to back without getting bored. He has a knack for grabbing your attention and taking you along for the ride.
These stories were fun and I enjoyed the whole collection. I just didn't like maybe three or four of the twenty-three.
I could read Andersen Prunty's stories back to back without getting bored. He has a knack for grabbing your attention and taking you along for the ride.
These stories were fun and I enjoyed the whole collection. I just didn't like maybe three or four of the twenty-three.
September 14, 2012
*sorry, didn't mean to write a damn essay*
In an interview he did near the end of his life--and I’m paraphrasing here--Jorges Luis Borges said the task of the artist is to transform stimuli from the external world into symbols, into things that “last can last in man’s memory.” The emphasis in this idea is not mimesis but rather transformation—i.e. the creation of something that, though it refers back symbolically to the raw materials from which it was constructed, is itself something entirely new. The universe of shared “objective” reality experienced as external stimuli is a nearly infinite pool from which the artist/writer can select pieces of phenomena to alter, combine, break, etc. in order to produce a work of art.
Using bits and pieces of reality, one can build art in accordance with a number of predefined sets of rules (e.g. established literary/artistic forms, genres, subgenres, etc.) in order to generate what we call conventional works of art/fiction. But there is no limit to what an artist can do with those infinite building blocks. At least in terms of the written word, it is the writer of surrealist/absurdist/bizarro fiction who enjoys the widest range of creative freedom in playing with these building blocks, and I believe one of the greatest assets of these modes of writing is the capacity for unpredictability, something I’ve always valued highly in books, films, and music.
Now granted, not all predictability in life is bad. Take pizza, for example. Famished, you take that warm cardboard box off the hands of the delivery guy, give him his money, kick your front door shut, set the box on a table, flip the lid up, grab that first hot slice of cheese-dripping goodness, raise it to your open mouth. When this occurs, do you want that bite of pizza to taste differently from what you expect it to taste like? Probably not.
But not all of life’s predictability is so joyful. There’s the predictability of the daily grind and its accompanying tedium for instance. And then there’s the ultimate predictability:
Spoiler alert (for your life): you are going to die!
One of the principal reasons I often seek out fiction, movies, and music that fall in the realm of the unconventional/avant-garde is specifically to experience some manner of unpredictability. Such unpredictability is an effective respite from life’s more negative forms of predictability: a temporary escape from the escapable as it were.
The excellent short stories in Andersen Prunty’s The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians got me thinking about all this. Talk about taking bits of our shared reality and then mixing, mashing, repurposing, deconstructing, reconstructing, eating, and fucking them. I’ll take a look at one of these little stories to show you what I mean (spoiler alert).
In the flash fiction piece “Napper,” a man comes home from work and decides to take a nap. He sleeps for hours and hours and his wife, who has not slept in years, gets upset with him for napping for so long. She attempts unsuccessfully to wake him. To distract herself, she turns on the TV but finds no comfort there because every damn channel shows a close up of a man sleeping. So she gets on the phone, calls other family members who are experiencing the same problem with their spouses. They commiserate with each other and devise complicated plans to “eradicate sleep from society.” She eventually gets off the phone.
Now prior to this moment in the story, I had already peaked onto the next page to see how long the story was (as is my habit sometimes), so I knew that following the wife’s hanging up the phone, there were only a few sentences left of the story.
So where the hell is this one going? I thought. What’s the reveal gonna be here? Finally pushed to the edge, is the wife now going to leave her excessively slumberous husband? Or is she gonna wake his ass up via some gruesome act of violence maybe? Yeah, that must be it.
Nope. Wrong.
Rather, the man wakes up from his nap late in the night. He announces the nap was great. His wife then asks him if he wants to go out and “fuck some shit up.” He tells her “of course” because he knows that’s the only way he’ll ever be able to fall back asleep again after taking such a long nap. The couple proceeds to go out into the night armed with “baseball bats, blowtorches, and high powered flashlights.”
The End.
Now that’s the sort of unpredictability I’m talking about. Here you have excessive napping, insomnia, husbands, wives, worrying, dissatisfaction, high powered flashlights, the colloquialism “fucking some shit up” and the thing that expression represents. In and of themselves, these are all the “normal” mundane things of everyday life--bits and piece of our shared reality, things we’ve all experienced as external stimuli is some way or another. But take these phenomena, give them a brilliantly creative little shuffle, and you get this fantastic, odd little piece of flash fiction. Every story in The Driver's Guide is like that, and there's not a bad apple in the bunch.
In an interview he did near the end of his life--and I’m paraphrasing here--Jorges Luis Borges said the task of the artist is to transform stimuli from the external world into symbols, into things that “last can last in man’s memory.” The emphasis in this idea is not mimesis but rather transformation—i.e. the creation of something that, though it refers back symbolically to the raw materials from which it was constructed, is itself something entirely new. The universe of shared “objective” reality experienced as external stimuli is a nearly infinite pool from which the artist/writer can select pieces of phenomena to alter, combine, break, etc. in order to produce a work of art.
Using bits and pieces of reality, one can build art in accordance with a number of predefined sets of rules (e.g. established literary/artistic forms, genres, subgenres, etc.) in order to generate what we call conventional works of art/fiction. But there is no limit to what an artist can do with those infinite building blocks. At least in terms of the written word, it is the writer of surrealist/absurdist/bizarro fiction who enjoys the widest range of creative freedom in playing with these building blocks, and I believe one of the greatest assets of these modes of writing is the capacity for unpredictability, something I’ve always valued highly in books, films, and music.
Now granted, not all predictability in life is bad. Take pizza, for example. Famished, you take that warm cardboard box off the hands of the delivery guy, give him his money, kick your front door shut, set the box on a table, flip the lid up, grab that first hot slice of cheese-dripping goodness, raise it to your open mouth. When this occurs, do you want that bite of pizza to taste differently from what you expect it to taste like? Probably not.
But not all of life’s predictability is so joyful. There’s the predictability of the daily grind and its accompanying tedium for instance. And then there’s the ultimate predictability:
Spoiler alert (for your life): you are going to die!
One of the principal reasons I often seek out fiction, movies, and music that fall in the realm of the unconventional/avant-garde is specifically to experience some manner of unpredictability. Such unpredictability is an effective respite from life’s more negative forms of predictability: a temporary escape from the escapable as it were.
The excellent short stories in Andersen Prunty’s The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians got me thinking about all this. Talk about taking bits of our shared reality and then mixing, mashing, repurposing, deconstructing, reconstructing, eating, and fucking them. I’ll take a look at one of these little stories to show you what I mean (spoiler alert).
In the flash fiction piece “Napper,” a man comes home from work and decides to take a nap. He sleeps for hours and hours and his wife, who has not slept in years, gets upset with him for napping for so long. She attempts unsuccessfully to wake him. To distract herself, she turns on the TV but finds no comfort there because every damn channel shows a close up of a man sleeping. So she gets on the phone, calls other family members who are experiencing the same problem with their spouses. They commiserate with each other and devise complicated plans to “eradicate sleep from society.” She eventually gets off the phone.
Now prior to this moment in the story, I had already peaked onto the next page to see how long the story was (as is my habit sometimes), so I knew that following the wife’s hanging up the phone, there were only a few sentences left of the story.
So where the hell is this one going? I thought. What’s the reveal gonna be here? Finally pushed to the edge, is the wife now going to leave her excessively slumberous husband? Or is she gonna wake his ass up via some gruesome act of violence maybe? Yeah, that must be it.
Nope. Wrong.
Rather, the man wakes up from his nap late in the night. He announces the nap was great. His wife then asks him if he wants to go out and “fuck some shit up.” He tells her “of course” because he knows that’s the only way he’ll ever be able to fall back asleep again after taking such a long nap. The couple proceeds to go out into the night armed with “baseball bats, blowtorches, and high powered flashlights.”
The End.
Now that’s the sort of unpredictability I’m talking about. Here you have excessive napping, insomnia, husbands, wives, worrying, dissatisfaction, high powered flashlights, the colloquialism “fucking some shit up” and the thing that expression represents. In and of themselves, these are all the “normal” mundane things of everyday life--bits and piece of our shared reality, things we’ve all experienced as external stimuli is some way or another. But take these phenomena, give them a brilliantly creative little shuffle, and you get this fantastic, odd little piece of flash fiction. Every story in The Driver's Guide is like that, and there's not a bad apple in the bunch.
February 20, 2012
A random collection of lock and load short stories by Andersen Prunty, extremely short stories, with the longest being 13 pages long and the shortest being 1-2. It was a trip... a true bizarro trip. I think I expected more from Prunty though. I loved 'Zerostrata,' and 'My Fake War' was great, but this collection of short stories left something to be desired, it almost felt like a tease.
At times some of the stories were disturbing, bizarre, and a couple were pretty darn funny. Hitting Pedestrians is a collection of stories from the warped mind of Prunty, a well established crazy man, that also knows how to write a wild yarn of bizarro. There are some good nuggets like the title cut of the book, 'The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians,' and others like 'Divorce', 'Chainsaw Mouth' and 'Reading Manko'.
There were a couple that seemed almost flat out pointless, not funny or weird, just nothing, as if they were a start or setup to a story that abruptly just ends, and your left with your pockets turned out holding lint.
If you haven't started reading bizarro pick up something by Andersen Prunty or Carlton Mellick III for a good introduction to the genre. After this read I'll think twice before joking about hitting someone with my car and I'll never look at a 3-legged dog the same (like 'Champion' the 3-legged dog on Parks & Recreation).
At times some of the stories were disturbing, bizarre, and a couple were pretty darn funny. Hitting Pedestrians is a collection of stories from the warped mind of Prunty, a well established crazy man, that also knows how to write a wild yarn of bizarro. There are some good nuggets like the title cut of the book, 'The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians,' and others like 'Divorce', 'Chainsaw Mouth' and 'Reading Manko'.
There were a couple that seemed almost flat out pointless, not funny or weird, just nothing, as if they were a start or setup to a story that abruptly just ends, and your left with your pockets turned out holding lint.
If you haven't started reading bizarro pick up something by Andersen Prunty or Carlton Mellick III for a good introduction to the genre. After this read I'll think twice before joking about hitting someone with my car and I'll never look at a 3-legged dog the same (like 'Champion' the 3-legged dog on Parks & Recreation).
November 4, 2011
Instead of explaining this collection with a series of words (surreal, funny, bleak, odd, etc.) I have decided to just go for broke and talk about each story, because I have never done that before, and today is a new day, with a new sun, and I ate a french dip while reading this book.
1. "The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians": this story explains the rules of a new sort of "game" in which drivers earn points by hitting pedestrians. He who hits the most peds, gets a cash prize. This story was a little dark, and kind of reminded me of Palahniuk's book, "Rant". Which was pretty awesome, just like this story. Pretty awesome.
2. "The Laughing Crusade": a quasi-political sort of story about laughers and people in comas. I originally read this story on "Bust Down The Door and Eat All the Chickens", and was just as flabbergasted this time as I was that time.
3. "Architecture": This was one of my favorites in this collection. It is about an architect building his last building. Good stuff. Real weird, and strangely deep. Whatever.
4. "Chainsaw Mouth": Andersen Prunty is a bleak guy, I think. He has a way of taking these strange, humorous things and making them kind of sad. Beautiful, yes. But sad.
5. "Napper": women don't like lazy men.
6., 7. & 8. "Princess Electricity" "The Balloonman's Secret" and "Reading Manko": these three were my absolute favorites. Not just in this collection. Not just by Andersen Prunty. No. I mean, they are amongst my most favorite short stories I have ever read. They are like reading dreams, or walking accidentally into another world where you are completely unfamiliar with the customs and rituals. I wish more stories were like these.
9. "Alone in a Room Thinking About All the People who have Died": *shrug* I dunno. This one was weird.
10. "The Tailors": Short, strange, and very well written story about clothes and those who mend them when we are unhappy.
11. "The Champion of Needham Avenue": Shovel fights.
12. "teething": another favorite of mine. One of the best in the collection. Says I.
13. "Toss": Super funny, the father figure says and does some hilarious stuff here.
14. "Where I Go To Die": Another bleak one, with people mistreating one another, strange rituals that are half-realized and vague, and death.
15. "The Ohio Grass Monster": in a collection featuring a town full of Terrys, sentient sex dolls, and more, I would have to say that THIS story was the true oddball in the collection. It is strange, yet somehow realistically so. The things that take place could really take place, probably have.
Probably to Andersen Prunty.
16. "the Cover-Up": a father needs help after doing something bad. It would be easier just to show you.
17., 18., 19, "Lost" "Dog In Orbit" and "Two Children Who Want To Drive Off A Cliff": I don't know if I was supposed to or not, but I laughed all the way through these ones.
20. "Rivalry": Prunty has a knack for writing stories that are at first a bit nonsensical, then after you read them and have had time to drink some soda pop, you start to wonder if maybe there was some deeper meaning, some sort of weird absolute truth or something that you missed, and maybe you could understand it better if you read it three or four more times. SO you do. And you still don't get it. But you want to read it again. I am not just talking about this story inparticular, but MOST of his writing.
At least it is that way for me.
And I love it.
21."A 3-legged Dog Dying of Cancer": I really didn't get this one. The only story in the whole book I wasn't all that fond of.
22. "Divorce": a sad story about love and lonely people-things and how they go about their lives.
23: "the Melancholy Room": I loved this story. It was strange and beautiful and dark and...uh...just really, really good.
Basically, if you like strange fiction that makes you laugh and think and is fast and easy to read you will like this book and I think you should probably read it because I did and now I am telling you to do it too okay?
Good.
1. "The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians": this story explains the rules of a new sort of "game" in which drivers earn points by hitting pedestrians. He who hits the most peds, gets a cash prize. This story was a little dark, and kind of reminded me of Palahniuk's book, "Rant". Which was pretty awesome, just like this story. Pretty awesome.
2. "The Laughing Crusade": a quasi-political sort of story about laughers and people in comas. I originally read this story on "Bust Down The Door and Eat All the Chickens", and was just as flabbergasted this time as I was that time.
3. "Architecture": This was one of my favorites in this collection. It is about an architect building his last building. Good stuff. Real weird, and strangely deep. Whatever.
4. "Chainsaw Mouth": Andersen Prunty is a bleak guy, I think. He has a way of taking these strange, humorous things and making them kind of sad. Beautiful, yes. But sad.
5. "Napper": women don't like lazy men.
6., 7. & 8. "Princess Electricity" "The Balloonman's Secret" and "Reading Manko": these three were my absolute favorites. Not just in this collection. Not just by Andersen Prunty. No. I mean, they are amongst my most favorite short stories I have ever read. They are like reading dreams, or walking accidentally into another world where you are completely unfamiliar with the customs and rituals. I wish more stories were like these.
9. "Alone in a Room Thinking About All the People who have Died": *shrug* I dunno. This one was weird.
10. "The Tailors": Short, strange, and very well written story about clothes and those who mend them when we are unhappy.
11. "The Champion of Needham Avenue": Shovel fights.
12. "teething": another favorite of mine. One of the best in the collection. Says I.
13. "Toss": Super funny, the father figure says and does some hilarious stuff here.
14. "Where I Go To Die": Another bleak one, with people mistreating one another, strange rituals that are half-realized and vague, and death.
15. "The Ohio Grass Monster": in a collection featuring a town full of Terrys, sentient sex dolls, and more, I would have to say that THIS story was the true oddball in the collection. It is strange, yet somehow realistically so. The things that take place could really take place, probably have.
Probably to Andersen Prunty.
16. "the Cover-Up": a father needs help after doing something bad. It would be easier just to show you.
17., 18., 19, "Lost" "Dog In Orbit" and "Two Children Who Want To Drive Off A Cliff": I don't know if I was supposed to or not, but I laughed all the way through these ones.
20. "Rivalry": Prunty has a knack for writing stories that are at first a bit nonsensical, then after you read them and have had time to drink some soda pop, you start to wonder if maybe there was some deeper meaning, some sort of weird absolute truth or something that you missed, and maybe you could understand it better if you read it three or four more times. SO you do. And you still don't get it. But you want to read it again. I am not just talking about this story inparticular, but MOST of his writing.
At least it is that way for me.
And I love it.
21."A 3-legged Dog Dying of Cancer": I really didn't get this one. The only story in the whole book I wasn't all that fond of.
22. "Divorce": a sad story about love and lonely people-things and how they go about their lives.
23: "the Melancholy Room": I loved this story. It was strange and beautiful and dark and...uh...just really, really good.
Basically, if you like strange fiction that makes you laugh and think and is fast and easy to read you will like this book and I think you should probably read it because I did and now I am telling you to do it too okay?
Good.
December 5, 2020
I accidentally stepped into a a pile of BIZZARRO and loved every word of it. I chose this book strictly from author name and cover. And the blurb. The author invites us to explore pain with him. Well, I assumed something different, but was very pleased with what I got. I expected for real physical pain
Perhaps the author was being metaphorical.
The book starts strong about a game where you run people over with vehicles. It was rather normal and fun. Then it got weird from there. One of my faves was about a bookstore selling authors, not books. Pretty neat. Another story reminded me of an acid trip from back in my college days. FYI,I never did acid (?maybe?). If I did, maybe I thought all my teeth fell out of my head. Overall,each short packs a punch that left me scratching my head trying to make sense of things. Then I relaxed, took a deep breath, and enjoyed them for face value. Because reading is FUN. This book is FUN
Perhaps the author was being metaphorical.
The book starts strong about a game where you run people over with vehicles. It was rather normal and fun. Then it got weird from there. One of my faves was about a bookstore selling authors, not books. Pretty neat. Another story reminded me of an acid trip from back in my college days. FYI,I never did acid (?maybe?). If I did, maybe I thought all my teeth fell out of my head. Overall,each short packs a punch that left me scratching my head trying to make sense of things. Then I relaxed, took a deep breath, and enjoyed them for face value. Because reading is FUN. This book is FUN
January 9, 2013
I've read some of Prunty's collections of horror stories and I enjoyed those... I didn't enjoy this at all. I liked the general concept of a few of the stories, but that's it. I reached the end of most of the stories just wondering why they had even been written down. I felt like he had some strange dreams, wrote them down and published it. This book seems to have quite a few good, even great, reviews so there is an audience for this, but I'm missing whatever it is that those people liked so much about this book.
November 8, 2022
If you're not a fan of bizarro there's no way you're going to read this and enjoy it. Prunty's short story collection is odd and sometimes the stories don't make sense, but that's the point. It's almost as if you've fallen asleep and these stories are the products of your odd dreams or nightmares. Even at their weirdest these are well written and entertaining. To write a review of each story would be too consumsing and even pointless because some of them are just too short. The collection as a whole just works and that's the important thing. Do the stories make sense? Not a lot of them do, but that's kind of the point.
August 7, 2022
Quite possibly the most imaginative short story collection I have ever read! What are you smoking Mr Prunty and where can I get some?
July 9, 2012
I first discovered Andersen Prunty a few years ago at a convention where I picked up a copy of his novel Zerostrata. I was blown away by his prose style, his handling of the material, but most of all by his sublime understanding of dream logic. I became an immediate fan.
In this wonderful collection, The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians, Prunty’s surreal narratives weave in and out of logic without ever feeling forced. That’s the gift Prunty provides us: His dream logic doesn’t ever feel random or weird just for the sake of spontaneity. No matter what happens, it feels deliberate, carefully constructed, and beautifully expressed.
The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians features Prunty’s musings on “the twenty-three most painful things in life” including such diverse topics as “relationships,” “fate” and “pants.” Once I started reading, I devoured these stories. There wasn’t a single story among the bunch that I felt didn’t belong here, though I’d like to highlight a few of my favorites without spoiling any of the surprises:
The titular story leads the charge, and is a wonderful exercise in world building. It takes the author mere sentences to lay out a whole sociopathic society for us, the detail dripping from the wheel wells of the drivers who run down pedestrians. Great characters, a fun story and a wondrous dystopian vision.
The Balloon Man’s Secret is easily one of the best short stories I’ve read in the past year. Poignant, amusing and written in a stylized way that establishes a time and place that seem familiar yet uniquely distinct. The character of the balloon man, and the people he meets, are absolutely wonderful, and the story wraps up so perfectly.
Prunty hands out an excellent dose of body horror in Teething, as short and pointed as it is unsettling. The ending, once again, was piercing and perfect.
But these are only the smallest handful of the goodies that await in this collection. Andersen Prunty’s shortest stories have a fascinating way of showing us the finer points of a character with great brevity. The Ohio Grass Monster, for example, reveals the inner workings of a troubled boy by simply showing us how he relates to his hobbies and his friends. What bubbles under the surface, Prunty leaves us to decide. Similarly, in stories like The Champion of Needham Avenue and Where I Go To Die, the prose is simple and alluring, even though the situations themselves are dreamlike and bizarre. The stories leave the reader with a sense of understanding and familiarity even though the place and people are unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. This is how Prunty’s dream logic operates, and it’s an amazing thing to behold. (I should also mention that The Champion of Needham Avenue might have the best opening line of any story, ever).
I highly recommend this stunning collection to anyone interested in short stories, especially those who enjoy lucid dreaming. The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians is like a lucid dream in which just after you’ve gotten control, everything changes and shifts, and you don’t trust the characters standing next to you even if they look like someone you know. They might just be something painful in disguise.
In this wonderful collection, The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians, Prunty’s surreal narratives weave in and out of logic without ever feeling forced. That’s the gift Prunty provides us: His dream logic doesn’t ever feel random or weird just for the sake of spontaneity. No matter what happens, it feels deliberate, carefully constructed, and beautifully expressed.
The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians features Prunty’s musings on “the twenty-three most painful things in life” including such diverse topics as “relationships,” “fate” and “pants.” Once I started reading, I devoured these stories. There wasn’t a single story among the bunch that I felt didn’t belong here, though I’d like to highlight a few of my favorites without spoiling any of the surprises:
The titular story leads the charge, and is a wonderful exercise in world building. It takes the author mere sentences to lay out a whole sociopathic society for us, the detail dripping from the wheel wells of the drivers who run down pedestrians. Great characters, a fun story and a wondrous dystopian vision.
The Balloon Man’s Secret is easily one of the best short stories I’ve read in the past year. Poignant, amusing and written in a stylized way that establishes a time and place that seem familiar yet uniquely distinct. The character of the balloon man, and the people he meets, are absolutely wonderful, and the story wraps up so perfectly.
Prunty hands out an excellent dose of body horror in Teething, as short and pointed as it is unsettling. The ending, once again, was piercing and perfect.
But these are only the smallest handful of the goodies that await in this collection. Andersen Prunty’s shortest stories have a fascinating way of showing us the finer points of a character with great brevity. The Ohio Grass Monster, for example, reveals the inner workings of a troubled boy by simply showing us how he relates to his hobbies and his friends. What bubbles under the surface, Prunty leaves us to decide. Similarly, in stories like The Champion of Needham Avenue and Where I Go To Die, the prose is simple and alluring, even though the situations themselves are dreamlike and bizarre. The stories leave the reader with a sense of understanding and familiarity even though the place and people are unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. This is how Prunty’s dream logic operates, and it’s an amazing thing to behold. (I should also mention that The Champion of Needham Avenue might have the best opening line of any story, ever).
I highly recommend this stunning collection to anyone interested in short stories, especially those who enjoy lucid dreaming. The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians is like a lucid dream in which just after you’ve gotten control, everything changes and shifts, and you don’t trust the characters standing next to you even if they look like someone you know. They might just be something painful in disguise.
February 5, 2016
There's a four door canoe floating down the river. One of its doors falls off. How many squirrels does it take to split a log cabin?
If that interragatory makes a lick of sense to you, so will Anderson Prunty's DRIVER'S GUIDE TO HITTING PEDESTRIANS.
This is a collection of transgressive flash fiction that, to this reviewer, makes little sense. There are glimmers of hope to those slightly less avant garde. By and large expect to be confused by the material that lies within.
This kind of crazy needs to be in your wheelhouse. It's not in mine. Sorry, one star.
If that interragatory makes a lick of sense to you, so will Anderson Prunty's DRIVER'S GUIDE TO HITTING PEDESTRIANS.
This is a collection of transgressive flash fiction that, to this reviewer, makes little sense. There are glimmers of hope to those slightly less avant garde. By and large expect to be confused by the material that lies within.
This kind of crazy needs to be in your wheelhouse. It's not in mine. Sorry, one star.
June 1, 2025
“The Driver’s Guide for Hitting Pedestrians" is an uncanny collection of short stories, ranging from one to three pages. While some, like “The Balloonman,” were intriguing, many didn’t hold my attention.
At only 90 pages, it took longer to finish than expected, likely because the stories felt too brief to fully engage me. For me, it was a break from longer novels, but I wouldn’t consider it a must-read. If you enjoy unconventional, quick reads, it might be worth to check out for you, but be ready for weird storytelling with abrupt endings.
At only 90 pages, it took longer to finish than expected, likely because the stories felt too brief to fully engage me. For me, it was a break from longer novels, but I wouldn’t consider it a must-read. If you enjoy unconventional, quick reads, it might be worth to check out for you, but be ready for weird storytelling with abrupt endings.
November 1, 2011
My favorite stories in this bizarro compilation by Andersen Prunty were The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians, Lost, and The Cover-Up. Nice work Prunty!
August 13, 2021
The titular story is great, I loved it. Unfortunately I felt the rest of the stories failed to live up to it, with many of them being so short there was no time for any investment from the reader.
September 8, 2019
This book is a collection of short stories that encompass various genres. And that's it. That's the only pro. The versatility.
The writing is poor. Almost all the short stories feel like they are incomplete or lacking something.
There are plenty of fishes in the sea and this fish is just not worth catching.
The writing is poor. Almost all the short stories feel like they are incomplete or lacking something.
There are plenty of fishes in the sea and this fish is just not worth catching.
March 17, 2019
I enjoyed many of these louche fictions. His prose has its asperities, in places, but the originality is worth the occasional abrasion. If you are easily triggered, these probably aren't for you. Black humor, gallows humor, lack of faith in humanity suffuse the stories. Prunty is never less than interesting for me. I appreciate his embrace of the real weirdness at the heart of freedom. Too much fiction is written with reins held tight and pearls clutched. This sure ain't that.
October 29, 2012
Andersen Prunty's The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians has to be one of the finest single-author collections of bizarro out there.
The cover and Prunty's hilarious description sold me on the book right away. Then I read it and that was good too. I make smart decisions.
Anwyay, the title story is a wonderful bit of macabre about a contest to see who can injure the most pedestrians. The contest comes complete with an oddball set of rules and a desperate, deranged cast of characters. This story is probably the closest to a standard narrative in the whole book, but it's still wild, weird, and fatalistic.
"The Laughing Crusade" might be my favorite. After finishing his treatise on the New Anarchist Revolution, a man retreats to his back porch for a beer and a cigarette. He soon stumbles upon the fact that the entire neighborhood is filled with people maniacally laughing and that they're going to crush all the non-laughers. The ending is truly disturbing--images I won't soon forget.
"Princess Electricity" is a surreal journey into a world where one buys loaves of bread with 10 ideas or gets a job by having the name Terry. And some random girl controls all of the electricity.
Every story in here is the real deal--unpredictable, imaginative, often funny. I like the variety in this collection--some of the stories lean toward horror, others toward fantasy, others are straight bizarro. Prunty's an author I can't get enough of.
The cover and Prunty's hilarious description sold me on the book right away. Then I read it and that was good too. I make smart decisions.
Anwyay, the title story is a wonderful bit of macabre about a contest to see who can injure the most pedestrians. The contest comes complete with an oddball set of rules and a desperate, deranged cast of characters. This story is probably the closest to a standard narrative in the whole book, but it's still wild, weird, and fatalistic.
"The Laughing Crusade" might be my favorite. After finishing his treatise on the New Anarchist Revolution, a man retreats to his back porch for a beer and a cigarette. He soon stumbles upon the fact that the entire neighborhood is filled with people maniacally laughing and that they're going to crush all the non-laughers. The ending is truly disturbing--images I won't soon forget.
"Princess Electricity" is a surreal journey into a world where one buys loaves of bread with 10 ideas or gets a job by having the name Terry. And some random girl controls all of the electricity.
Every story in here is the real deal--unpredictable, imaginative, often funny. I like the variety in this collection--some of the stories lean toward horror, others toward fantasy, others are straight bizarro. Prunty's an author I can't get enough of.
July 21, 2014
There's a restaurant that just opened up close by my home. Their philosophy is to give the customers something wonderful/delicious but small and it will keep the customers wanting more. This book made me feel this way. Mr. Prunty has one hell of an imagination and I wish that these stories could have been longer/fleshed out more.
December 3, 2018
What the...?
Okay, first the good:
Many of these stories show that Prunty is very adept in painting scenes and atmospheres. He uses his toolbox of stylistic devices very well, if not masterfully, and I am looking forward to reading one of his novellas or novels, soon. If these stories are any indication, those longer narratives should be awesome (at least stylistically).
And now the bad:
I know that bizarro will (and is allowed to) do a lot. But this? Most of the stories in here I would not even deem stories, just badly executed wild ideas without depth or point. One-page short stories can be done. But the shorter the story, the more masterfully it HAS to be done. There needs to be a point, there needs to be substance enough to make it a story. 12 of these stories (of 23) are no more than one or two pages long. And most of these could have been written by a 4th-grader with a huge vocabulary. No narrative tension, most often no point. These are not stories. This is not writing. It is just bad.
...okay, two or three of them work as parables, maybe. But that is it.
And of the other 11 stories (longer meaning anything between 4 and 15 or so pages), only very few are really any good (the title story is, maybe one or two others), but none of them is exceptional. And some are as pointless as the shorter ones.
Yes, bizarro is about being absurd for its own sake. But that does not mean you just throw together some random absurd situtations and can call that a story. Or even sell it.
I give the book 1 star for Prunty's at times masterful prose style. The narratives would not even warrant 1 star.
Do not read this book - it is, unfortunately, a waste of time and any money you could pay for it.
Okay, first the good:
Many of these stories show that Prunty is very adept in painting scenes and atmospheres. He uses his toolbox of stylistic devices very well, if not masterfully, and I am looking forward to reading one of his novellas or novels, soon. If these stories are any indication, those longer narratives should be awesome (at least stylistically).
And now the bad:
I know that bizarro will (and is allowed to) do a lot. But this? Most of the stories in here I would not even deem stories, just badly executed wild ideas without depth or point. One-page short stories can be done. But the shorter the story, the more masterfully it HAS to be done. There needs to be a point, there needs to be substance enough to make it a story. 12 of these stories (of 23) are no more than one or two pages long. And most of these could have been written by a 4th-grader with a huge vocabulary. No narrative tension, most often no point. These are not stories. This is not writing. It is just bad.
...okay, two or three of them work as parables, maybe. But that is it.
And of the other 11 stories (longer meaning anything between 4 and 15 or so pages), only very few are really any good (the title story is, maybe one or two others), but none of them is exceptional. And some are as pointless as the shorter ones.
Yes, bizarro is about being absurd for its own sake. But that does not mean you just throw together some random absurd situtations and can call that a story. Or even sell it.
I give the book 1 star for Prunty's at times masterful prose style. The narratives would not even warrant 1 star.
Do not read this book - it is, unfortunately, a waste of time and any money you could pay for it.
August 2, 2017
I probably liked the title story the most but I also loved each of the other thoughts that Prunty had written in this quick jaunt. Though, I am at odds, my brain is seeing these weird situations almost pan out. It is like I've dropped acid, but I've never done them before. This book is the region of my brain that never gets let out to exercise, it only gets weirder between the brief glimpses of sunshine through the crack in the closet door. I recommend this title to anyone that would like to explore some of what Andersen Prunty has to offer. The first work of his I read was The Sorrow King, I didn't know then that he was capable of these bizarre writings.
October 27, 2019
I received this book for free. I am voluntarily posting this review and all opinions expressed herein are my own.
I thought after reading the title and the blurb - I would really love this collection of stories. I didn't enjoy this at all - in fact, I could not even finish it. After listening to a few of these stories, I was just left wondering - What was the point of that? Why were these stories written? This book has good reviews so there is an audience for this, but clearly I'm am not one of them.
The narrator of this book is the author himself. His delivery is very mundane and droning. Unfortunately, this narration style added to my dislike of these stories.
I thought after reading the title and the blurb - I would really love this collection of stories. I didn't enjoy this at all - in fact, I could not even finish it. After listening to a few of these stories, I was just left wondering - What was the point of that? Why were these stories written? This book has good reviews so there is an audience for this, but clearly I'm am not one of them.
The narrator of this book is the author himself. His delivery is very mundane and droning. Unfortunately, this narration style added to my dislike of these stories.
December 7, 2016
Stunning
I really didn't know what to expect going in. I mean, I've read bizarre fiction before and it was like this. This was different, though. I find the interlacing of the strange and the emotional to be something of an anomaly in the bizzarro community, and in this book, Prunty manages to get to you. It's not there usual confrontation, though, that one might expect from literature, no. It's roundabout. It hits you from behind or it hits you in your sleep. I was moved. I was also disturbed. That, I suppose, is all I came here to be.
I really didn't know what to expect going in. I mean, I've read bizarre fiction before and it was like this. This was different, though. I find the interlacing of the strange and the emotional to be something of an anomaly in the bizzarro community, and in this book, Prunty manages to get to you. It's not there usual confrontation, though, that one might expect from literature, no. It's roundabout. It hits you from behind or it hits you in your sleep. I was moved. I was also disturbed. That, I suppose, is all I came here to be.
December 3, 2017
I thoroughly enjoyed the title story. As well as the last one and the story about the balloon man. This collection certainly has its gems, which alone make it worth reading. But overall, this book fell short for me. I had high expectations going in, being a g=huge fan of Prunty's other works, but this one just didn't have the same affect. I don't know how to explain it (clearly). But overall, I wanted more from this collection. Still recommended, but not nearly as good as this author's other works.
May 8, 2020
How have I only just heard of Andersen Prunty this last week?
I received a bunch of his ebooks for free and have just been tearing through them. This collection is the epitome of why.
They're strange. Disturbing. They give you no time to adjust. No room to question while you're reading, and no option but to question after.
I can't imagine everyone would enjoy this collection, but I know I did. If you're looking for something really out of the box, this is probably it.
I received a bunch of his ebooks for free and have just been tearing through them. This collection is the epitome of why.
They're strange. Disturbing. They give you no time to adjust. No room to question while you're reading, and no option but to question after.
I can't imagine everyone would enjoy this collection, but I know I did. If you're looking for something really out of the box, this is probably it.
July 12, 2021
These are barely qualified to be first drafts, and certainly aren't "short stories". These ill-conceived, flatly written sketches hinging on a motif that is superficially shocking or weird and contain no depth of analysis, no thought, nothing interesting to think about or consider. It reminds me of the worst aspects of authors like Chuck Palahniuk, but even more grating.
Terrible, terrible collection.
Terrible, terrible collection.
January 11, 2018
A bunch of weird, aimless stories
It’s a bunch of weird stories. If you like weird stories, you’ll probably like this. If you don’t like weird stories and prefer your stories to have some kind of point, meaning, character development, or overall direction other than being weird, you might not like this.
Not for me.
It’s a bunch of weird stories. If you like weird stories, you’ll probably like this. If you don’t like weird stories and prefer your stories to have some kind of point, meaning, character development, or overall direction other than being weird, you might not like this.
Not for me.
May 23, 2023
Waaaaait a minute. I didn't expect this to be so entertaining. It was hilarious but terrifying at the same time? It felt like an extreme version of urban legends/folk stories. Some of it were absurd, some of it were deeply disturbing. You just don't know what you'll be getting next. What a nice way to end the day.
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