"In these spare, understated tales, you wander heedlessly back and forth
across the boundary between reality and fantasy. Before you know it,
life is bizarre. And before you know it, you're laughing at the
excesses of civilization, and at yourself."
—Faris Cassell, Eugene Register-Guard
In his second book of humorous tales, Jeffrey Shaffer takes the reader inside a boot camp for laundromat offenders, a right-wing private school, and a cold-cream testing site. He listens in on conversations with an alien, with a general in the midst of a national crisis and, most frightening of all, with an unborn daughter. He considers the what-ifs of catastrophes like an asteroid striking the earth, the collapse of the dollar, and the destruction of television. And he introduces such characters as insurance adjusters who follow the destructive path of Godzilla, an "orthopractor" whose manipulations out-manipulate Hollywood, and a guy who's been frozen for years in Alaska. "Jeffrey Shaffer is — not to put too fine a point on it — hilarious.
Well, he is hilarious if your sense of humor has a slight warp — or perhaps
even a large woof — to it. ... keen-edged and pointed rapiers, slicing and
skewering sacred cows and modern sensibilities alike."
—Steve Perry, Portland Oregonian
"These stories are strange; some of them are laugh-out-loud funny—
if the reader is the type who 'gets' Far Side cartoons. ... [Shaffer] makes writing
stories like this look easy—an incredibly difficult task."
—Library Journal
But these thumbnail descriptions hardly give a clue as to where Shaffer goes with his situations and characters. He is, above all, unpredictable. His humor is based primarily on surprise and a rich imagination, not repetition or overstatement, and his wildly imaginative stories are told in calm prose, with twists and turns and a touch of pathos. They approach reality from a variety of angles, so that the oddest people and situations seem just the way things are, or will be.
$13.95 paper, $3 e-book, 192 pp., ISBN 0-945774-36-2.
An e-book of It Came with the House can now be purchased directly from Catbird Press in PDF, EPub, or MOBI (Kindle) formats for $3.
Payment is via Pay Pal (our Pay Pal e-mail address is catbird@pipeline.com). Include a note in your payment, such as
"Please send a (format name) of It Came with the House to (your e-mail address)" or send a separate e-mail to info@catbirdpress.com,
which we can respond to with the e-book attached.
Click here to read two sample stories from It Came With the House.
Catbird Homepage | Humor for Grownups | Catbird Authors | Catbird Titles | Catbird Links