‘The Book of Outcasts’, stories by Matt Nagin   (2025) – 243 pages

Outcasts. The outcasts in these stories include a severe gambling addict, a serial wandering husband, a shopaholic, several loan deadbeats, a mommy’s boy, a failure (One story is simply entitled “The Failure”), and a pair of evil twins on the internet named Nagin.

But always look on the bright side. Even the most gruesome stories here, even the one about being eaten alive by twenty crocodiles, are told with a comical mischievous undertone. It is the direct straightforward quality of the writing that make these stories work, as well as the undercurrent of dark humor which is always there.

In the story “Valley of Darkness”, gambling addict Sam is so desperate for money that he sells his baby daughter Lucy to a Baby Pawn Shop in order to get money to gamble. At the Baby Pawn Shop, the babies are kept in cages, and if Sam doesn’t pay the money with steep interest back within six months, his baby daughter will be sold to the highest bidder. Outcasts, indeed.

In the doppelganger story, “Nagin vs. Nagin”, our “hero” justifies himself:

“All would have been lost had I not broken into this house, stolen his manuscript, slept with his wife and beaten him to the punchline—a necessary evil—a matter of survival in a cruel, barbarous world. It was war. And in war a man had to do what was necessary to achieve victory!”

All of the stories in this collection are imaginative, well written and a pleasure to read. Perhaps my favorite story is “Get Your Implant”. In this story, many of the people around James are getting AI (Artificial Intelligence) implants in their brains.

“Face it James. I’m a better version of myself. You’ll be one too once you get your implant.”

People who only had their lame human brains were useless and put in detention camps. James refuses to get an implant and joins Cerebral Freedom Fighters.

“Why would employers hire someone without memory of everything in human history? Without the capacity to execute lightning quick decisions with perfect reliability? Without an intelligence no mortal can match? Why accept that liability? I sat there looking at my hands, feeling like an alien.”

Considering the direction things are headed now, this is an all too likely scenario. No one with an AI implant has any empathy or concern for anyone else besides themselves; in other words, Trump World.

There is a wild energy surging through these stories, and despite the desperate extreme circumstances and the characters’ outlandish frenetic actions, the stories are playful and ring true as a bell.

Grade:    A