Welcome Thieves: Stories

by Sean Beaudoin

Black humor mixed with pathos is the hallmark of the twelve stories in this adult debut collection from a master writer of comic and inventive YA novels. A young man spends a whole day lying naked on the floor of his apartment, conversing casually with his roommates, pondering the past, considering the lives being lived around him. In the odd and funny, sad yet somehow hopeful conceit of Sean Beaudoin’s story “Exposure,” are all the elements that make his debut collection, Welcome Thieves, a standout. In twelve virtuosic stories, Beaudoin trains his absurdist’s eye on the ridiculous perplexities of adult life. From muddling through after the apocalypse (“Base Omega Has Twelve Dictates”) to the knowing smirk of “You Too Can Graduate with a Degree in Contextual Semiotics,” Beaudoin’s stories are edgy and profane, bittersweet and angry, bemused and sardonic. Yet they’re always tinged with heart. Beaudoin’s novels have been praised for their playfulness and complexity, for the originality and beauty of their language. Those same qualities, and much more, are on full display in Welcome Thieves, a book that should find devout fans in readers who worship at the altar of George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, and Sam Lipsyte. “A deviously spellbinding collection of short stories in which strange and beautiful worlds, creations of Sean Beaudoin’s dark and sometimes brutal imagination, emerge as part of a tapestry so finely woven that we don’t see the thread. In the end, we can only stand in awe of Beaudoin’s immense talent.” —Garth Stein, author of A Sudden Light

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Comedy, Anthologies, Literary Fiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 23, 2016

About the author

Sean Beaudoin is the author of five Young Adult novels, including the rude zombie love story The Infects, and the black comedy rock and roll love story Wise Young Fool. Sean likes love stories almost as much as he loves to talk about himself in the third person. Welcome Thieves is a short story collection that will be out March '16 with Algonquin Press.

Reviews

[TL *Humaning the Best She Can* · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slightly rough in the beginning stories (but still good) and got better as each story went along.
A rough, gritty vibe to them and somehow charming in some cases :).

The "Dark humor"aspect... I didn't find them 'amusing' per-say but I still very much enjoyed this collection, it was easy for me to get lost in the stories. A perfect escape from not feeling good and crazy-busy work nights (back-to-school weekend and early Labor Day shoppers, bleh).

Some of these stories are the type that will grow on you after multiple readings methinks... you enjoy them but appreciate more the next time around.

My humble opinion/experience anyway :).

Overall a solid collection of stories and I look forward to reading more from this author.

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Individual ratings (if you are interested) :

Nick in Nine (9) movements: 3.5 stars

The Rescues: 4 stars

Hey Monkey Chow: 3-3.5 stars

D.C. Metro: 4 stars"

All Dreams are night dreams - 4 stars, with a slightly creepy vibe all the way through.

You too Can Graduate in Three Years with a Degree in Contextual Semiotics (Mouthful of a title): 3 stars... perfect length for it, any longer and would have skipped the rest of the story... not bad, not great *shrugs*

And Now Let's Have Some Fun: 3.5 stars

Tiffany Marzano's got a record: 3.5 stars

Comedy Hour: 4 stars

Base Omega Has Twelve Dictates: 4 stars

Exposure 3.5 stars

Welcome Thieves: four stars
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[Kriss Kross · Rating 2 out of 5]

I generally like short story collections, however I found it really difficult to relate to the characters in this book. I imagine this book would appeal more to a sort of middle class hipster / champagne socialist.

For something similar, I much prefered ‘Young Skins’ by Colin Barret.

[Sandie · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this anthology of twelve stories, Sean Beaudoin explores everyday life from an offbeat, darker point of view. Beaudoin made his mark writing YA novels but these stories show that he is an expert at working his way into adult minds and minds that aren't the ordinary ones. These are minds at the edge of society and the situations he narrates are not your everyday normal occurrences.

In And Now Let's Have Some Fun, the reader is transported into the world of professional boxing. In D.C. Metro, we meet Penny, who is renting a room and trying to go straight but who falls back into destructive habits she can't seem to escape. Exposure is about a tenement apartment house and its inhabitants. The Rescues take us inside the world of a collegiate lacrosse player after he has sacrificed his body for his sport and is left at an early age to figure out the rest of his life. In each story, there is an offbeat aspect but also a human commonality that lets the reader feel that we are truly all connected, that there are emotions and experiences we all can relate to. This book is recommended for literary fiction and anthology readers.

[Clay Cassells · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beaudoin’s collection of darkly funny short stories has style and wit to burn. His oft-times doomed characters and sardonic, crackling prose bring to mind the amazing fiction of Sam Lipsyte, another favorite author with whom he shares an obvious stylistic kinship. Every story in the collection dazzles with both laugh-out-loud moments and surprising depth and pathos. This is just fantastic stuff; I can’t wait for Beaudoin’s next book.

[Mindy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was not really a fan of this collection of short stories. The sentences in many stories were short and almost blunted. I don't know how else to describe them. There also wasn't much in the way of descriptive language in most of the stories. The characters were difficult to resonate with and I was unable to relate to any of their stories. I give two stars because I did like one or two of the twelve stories.

[Gerard · Rating 1 out of 5]

The stories were just not very good

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sean Beaudoin has, correctly, been compared to Raymond Carver. His pathos, his gritty, dark humour and focus on real-life people in their teens to mid-twenties is pretty similar to Carver. The grimy diners, the girls who settle for scumbags, the dudes who peaked in their teens only to become failures or otherwise disappointments later. It’s an accurate comparison, and if you like Carver, you’ll like Beaudoin.

Duff apologizes by spray painting the wall of the practice space jesus loves torrentials. There’s an anarchy circle around the A. Nikki has zero clue what anarchy is, or even wants to be. Something about wallet chains and waiters getting more per hour, plus tips.

This collection of short stories is a great reflection of our generation. While some veer into the science fiction/speculative fiction realms, dealing with post-apocalyptic nightmare-scapes, the majority focus on people whose lives pretty much suck. Drug addicts, failed rock stars, the football player with a career-ending injury; the psychic punk rock chick. Beaudoin captures the ultimate anticlimax of being a young adult in the 21st century, although some stories do have a slight glimmer of hope in them (however briefly).

There was a purity to mayhem. To split lips and sprung hamstrings, when mud tasted as good as blood.

Beaudoin captures moments in time with a vividness that is unique; his style is (uncannily) poetically gritty. Blood, drugs, sex, death and an underlying rot fill the pages, and yet his choice of words verges on beautiful. It’s like a car wreck that you can’t tear your eyes away from; watching the lives of his characters erupt into volcanoes of despair, or fizzle out into puddles of apathy. Snapshots of lives that reek, but glimmers of light, love and joy that appear and disappear as quickly.

Genius was a code pulsed down from a binary star, a revelatory percussive wave. It was math plus rhythm, an equation of intervals, the sound and then not the sound, something that could never be snorted or faked or even approached by the fastest, most devastating sprint across an open, grassy field.

One aspect of Beaudoin’s style that stood out for me, which will either make you love or hate him, is the collection of consecutive incomplete sentences. I recognised the artistry in it, but I found it so jarring (especially when I saw the “trick” repeated in several stories) that it put me off, a bit. I thought maybe it was trying too hard; making the writing too visible. I prefer the writing to disappear as the worlds become more vivid. If you think about it in artistic terms, it’s like the difference between realism and cubism; Beaudoin makes you so aware of the tricks and techniques of his writing that at times it obscures the story itself.

Decide chat rooms are a symbol for death. Decide cell phones are an emblem for death. Decide computers are a representation of death. Decide television is an allegory for death.

In that sense, I think this is one of those books that the literati will love, but laymen will loathe. They are stories that are a delight to pick apart, searching for the subtle literary tricks that reveal allegory, ulterior motives and extra meaning. But without that, I found them to be a bit thin. The approach you take to these stories will determine your enjoyment of them. I found that I had to be in the right kind of mindset to read them; otherwise I found myself trudging through passages that (to my exhausted mind) felt repetitive and unnecessary. I found myself missing the point of a lot of the stories. I found myself not caring all that much when I did.

In the end, there’s nothing that you couldn’t take 80 percent less seriously. Except possibly generalized statements involving percentages.

Perhaps my favourite story in the whole collection was the one that was the most different from the others: I absolutely loved “Base Omega Has Twelve Dictates” in which a teenaged girl narrates her post-apocalyptic world within the framework of the new laws of her society. I loved the characters in it, and I would gladly read a novel extrapolated from that story. Beaudoin has made his name writing Young Adult novels, and while his short stories are exquisitely crafted and very, very clever, I guess they didn’t quite catch my attention the way they should have.

[Robert Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sean clocks detail and undertone in the way most people do only under extreme duress, like in the elongated milliseconds of a car accident or a mugging. That super speed observation streams through a lens both crystalline and funhouse, tinted and fisheye, strobe and lava lamp; lucky for him, he distills his impressions into vision quest prose. Otherwise, I feel sure he’d be dead. Maybe not in a grave, but dead, burnt from within.

Sean’s sentences, like chords somehow both hardcore and lush, baroquely clustered and overdriven, hum now in the analog world, on actual pages in an actual book, which you should purchase.

Perhaps there’s a word in another language – some Indo-European strain, I’m guessing, unmitigated by vowels – encompassing both depressed and exhilarated, inspired and dismayed. As a fellow writer, that’s what I felt reading the short story You Too Can Graduate in Three Years with a Degree in Contextual Semiotics (my intro to the collection). It’s a compressed history, told in third person, of a wayward guy, amour fou; a travelogue, brutal but also tender in the seams, intimate, like a conscience. Granted, it's not a great title, not easily recalled. But that's Sean; he’s like a musician who wants you to love the tunes, but not to be able to hum them until you’ve hung out with him in the sacred space for more than a lost weekend. (Fair enough.)

Reading Welcome Thieves, you'll get the sensation of sitting on the passenger side as Sean motors you through sensory smorgasbords of boy-men wrangling music from life and vice versa (Nick in Nine (9) Movements); blown-out knees, lips on scars, Mingus playing as strangers make their way across a futon (the hilarious, sad, sexy The Rescues); a dad-to-be teased to a precipice by lust and melancholy (Hey Monkey Chow); and a fully realized psychic punk pixie (D.C. Metro).

There's more, of course; Welcome Thieves onto your bookshelf, your nightstand, your TV-lit sofa. When you're done, you'll wish they'd taken more.

[Aaron Dietz · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is the age of having everything you ever dreamed of (if you are a white male in the USA with a job, stable family life, and so on). In yet another installment of such, I have to reflect upon yet another wish I had that eventually came true (one example of such is when I wished that LEGO would start making sets based on Star Wars films--ta-da! It's real)--anyway, one time I went to a reading and saw Sean Beaudoin read a nice little tale that was hilarious and MEANT FOR ADULTS. I said to myself, "Wow, that was pretty entertaining. I wonder what it would be like if he published a book that was for adults instead of his always-amazing young adult material." And voila--now yet another wish has come true.

I think the book gets better as it goes on--my favorites are toward the end. "Tiffany Marzano's Got a Record was real and touching without any cheese. And "Base Omega Has Twelve Dictates" as well as "Welcome Thieves" gives me more of what I look forward to in Beaudoin's fiction: documents printed directly from the fictional world I'm reading about, this time in the form of a set of rules of behavior kept by a post-apocalyptic society of fun-o's, and in the form of postcards written to a nephew that is not really even in the story. Beautiful backmatter, only this time used as essential content--thank you, for this, Sean. "Exposure" may have topped them all. As I was reading it, I thought, this is truly original, and I wish I'd have thought of it, and I also thought, I'm going to write my own version right now because I am so inspired. And I will not share my own version, not because I'm against copying, but because it just isn't very good by comparison.

[Helen Marquis · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a debut collection of short stories, Sean Beaudoin certainly writes with confidence. This is an extremely assured and affecting collection of stories from the darker side of life. If you want fairy tales with Hollywood-esque happy endings, then I would suggest you look elsewhere.
The stand-out story for me was "And Now Let's Have Some Fun", a visceral and heart-breaking tale of no-holds-barred illegal fighting and one man's attempt to make a life for his pregnant wife and unborn child. It left me flat on my back on the canvas unable to get up long after the referee counted to 10....
Not all the stories are that good, but this a collection well worth investing in and reading. Not for the faint of heart, but a rollercoaster ride of a read. Recommended.

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 2 out of 5]

With the exception of the story "All Dreams are Night Dreams," I wasn't that impressed with this short story collection. Most of the stories have a similar tone, trying to be hip and cool, droll and world-weary with a certain air of immediacy to the writing. I found, with the occasional moment or setting, the stories to be a triumph of style over substance. Once you get past the author's outlook, there was very little to make you connect or care about the characters.

"All Dreams are Night Dreams" was an exception, as it was written in a very different style than the rest of the book, and I thought it maintained that tone with a clever twist at the end. Unfortunately, the other stories, even when I found the setting more interesting, couldn't rise to the same level.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories in Welcome Thieves feature, predominately, young people with little or no direction in life and little or no luck in getting to anyplace they may or may not desire to go. From current day to some type of dystopian future, each of the stories has a fairly dark and gloomy tone of hopelessness. Many are quite striking, like "And Now Let's Have Some Fun" about a creepy wrestling arena and its cannibalistic fighter gnashing at his opponents as the awful crowds place bets on potential disasters and disfigurements. Not quite my idea of pleasure reading, but the stories are imaginative and do leave an impression.

Thank you Sean Beaudoin and Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill for the copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

[Art Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read Sean Beaudoin's Welcome Thieves as a fellow writer is somehow to feel trumped. He's playing with hand that's just better than yours, and you're left to scramble to figure out exactly what it is you're doing at the table. For all that--and I'm probably contradicting myself here--it's also weirdly inviting. Sean is not one of those word masters who makes you want to fold up the tent and go home. This is a game worth playing, his playful tropes seem to say. What else are you gonna do? Nothing as cool as this.

If you're ready for a new voice, or if you're one of the thousands who have been in thrall of Sean's work online at The Weeklings, this will be a treat.

[Lauren Magee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beaudoin's stories are dark, gritty, humorous and thought provoking. His stories follow young people whose motives are questionable at best but you can't help but be addicted to their charisma. He weaves some magical realism and post apocalyptic elements seamlessly into his stories. A very enjoyable collection.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2. Loved "Base Omega Has Twelve Dictates"

[Eileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very smart, unusual stories. Maybe a little too hip for me.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3.5

Interesting style- writes more like bullet points than full sentences, full scenes. Hardly a single likable character though good writing doesn’t necessarily need a “good guy.”