Brad Watson’s third book of fiction, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, is a pleasant, slow evisceration. There are few of the roughest human experiences possible that Watson does not cover, from the aftermath of romantic relationships in “Visitation,” to unwanted pregnancy in “Water Dog God,” and the death of a sibling in “Alamo Plaza.” Yet Watson’s talent for capturing character makes each story necessary, and each heartbreak a trainwreck the reader cannot disregard.
The novella “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives” is the collection’s gem. The grotesque strangeness that overwhelms plot in “Ordinary Monsters” is smoothly integrated here with Watson’s arid southern style. The young narrator is practical and honest throughout his life’s story, spurred by an unplanned pregnancy and the wedding that results. The unshakable consistency of the tone carries the reader through many alternative lives that the narrator and his young bride could have lived, evaluating surreal possibilities as if a lion is no stranger in a Southern suburb than the story’s sweltering attic apartment or VW van. Resolution comes through the experiences of the narrator, who finds equilibrium and humanity in the process of deciding who around him is human and who is alien. In this uncertainty, Watson’s microscopic level of character detail proves useful; the reader can understand the truth of the situation along with the narrator.
Watson illuminates the lives of children well, whether he is invading their headspace or observing them from the character of an alienated father, he captures their variation and essence. In “Alamo Plaza,” Watson transitions smoothly from the narrator’s adult reflections to his childhood memories of his brother, capturing his death through description of a tropical storm’s aftermath: “some incredible violence had occurred, and yet almost everything remained intact.”
Despite Watson’s skill portraying men and children, his female characters seem limited to tragedy. In both “Fallen Nellie” and “The Misses Moses,” plots follow the characters’ descent into loneliness and failure without the redemption offered to Watson’s men in “Visitation” and “Are You Mr. Lonelee?” Yet in all of these, his description of physical sensation absorbs the reader into the mind of the narrator. The swift pace of the collection may make this sensory acuity exhausting, however; he does not give the reader more than half a breath before the next heartache.
Though Watson’s collection dwells on melancholy, it succeeds in transferring a fresh perspective on the muddiness of everyday life, carefully communicating what one of Watson’s characters calls “the inexplicable everyday, the oddness of being, the senseless belonging to this and not that.”
Watson is a professor of English at the University of Wyoming. His first collection of fiction Last Days of the Dog-Men won several awards for first fiction, and Aliens won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction.
--review published in Exile student literary magazine, spring 2016 ( )

I read about three-quarters of the stories in this collection over the past year and as I don't plan to finish it, decided I would write a review now.

The stories in the collection could most easily be characterized as modern southern gothic. Their subjects are deeply dysfunctional families in deeply dysfunctional situations and often in deep pain. I started it a year ago and some of them are quite memorable. My back almost hurts thinking back to the boy who jumped off his roof onto a rocking horse or some such. And in another story I read months ago, I can still see the nearly feral girl who walks around with her headphones. Or the story about a dead woman's body.

Several of them were worth reading, but as one might follow from those descriptions, it did not feel to me like a collection that I, at least, wanted to read from beginning to end. ( )

It's been more than fifteen years since I first read Brad Watson's first story collection, THE LAST DAYS OF THE DOGMEN. Then I found it in my shelves a couple years ago and was just going to look briefly at the first story, and ended up reading the whole book again. Because Watson knows how to create a tiny universe unto itself in the space of just 15-20 pages. The art of the short story, done well, is a tough trick, but Watson has mastered it. He does it again with this collection, ALIENS IN THE PRIME OF THEIR LIVES.

Just twelve stories, and all of them pretty damn good, although there is a kind of vaguely unhappy "sameness" to several of them, presented as what seem to be childhood recollections varnished with a thin but skillful veneer of invention; or tales of faltering marriages or relationships. Good FICTION, actually.

The three unnamed brothers in "Vacuum" seem unworried about the unstable nature of their parents' marriage, and you get the impression that they'll survive, no matter what happens. In "Water Dog God" you get Maeve, a wild child victim of incest, who shows up out of the wood with a pack of dogs. "Carl's Outside" gives us another child coping in the shadow of a troubled marriage. "Alamo Plaza" recounts a long-ago family vacation on the Gulf Coast recalled years later by the middle child. "Visitation" is what it sounds like, a divorced father trying to make his weekends with his son meaningful.

If I had to pick one weak story it would be "Fallen Nellie," the shortest, and a rather gruesome one that brought to mind Jim Crace's novel, BEING DEAD, a book I didn't particularly love.

The strongest story is, I think, the title one, about two teenagers, the girl pregnant, with strange overtones of the supernatural or, perhaps better, "alien" worlds. It's a damn fine story which may leave you scratching your head wondering what was real and what was imagined.

I thoroughly enjoyed Watson's stories. He's still got it. If you like a good short story, you'll like this book. I'll recommend it. ( )

I read about three-quarters of the stories in this collection over the past year and as I don't plan to finish it, decided I would write a review now.

The stories in the collection could most easily be characterized as modern southern gothic. Their subjects are deeply dysfunctional families in deeply dysfunctional situations and often in deep pain. I started it a year ago and some of them are quite memorable. My back almost hurts thinking back to the boy who jumped off his roof onto a rocking horse or some such. And in another story I read months ago, I can still see the nearly feral girl who walks around with her headphones. Or the story about a dead woman's body.

Several of them were worth reading, but as one might follow from those descriptions, it did not feel to me like a collection that I, at least, wanted to read from beginning to end. ( )

"[T]he inexplicable everyday, the oddness of being, the senseless belonging to this and not that." This line, from the story "Alamo Plaza," seems to sum up the outlook of the disaffected characters in Brad Watson’s Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives.

I picked this book up thinking it would be similar to the quirky hipster tales of Kelly Link, Karen Russell or Aimee Bender, so I was surprised to find a collection that shared more in common with the subtle, disquieting stories of Raymond Carver. That being said, I suspect I'm one of the few people out there who doesn't really "get" Carver, so perhaps the comparison shouldn't be viewed as great praise coming from me.

Watson’s prose is spare and perfectly distilled to create a vague, low grade tension throughout each piece. There often seems to be something lurking just outside the margins, something unspoken and potentially appalling. Something that exists always just beyond the reader’s peripheral vision. My favorite piece, "Terrible Argument," about the rapid disintegration of a marriage after one strange and violent episode, is told from the point of view of the couple’s bewildered and melancholy dog. Another, "Fallen Nellie," relates the unfortunate history of the corpse of a young woman lying about ten feet from a hiking trail. The author focuses his lens on the minutiae of his character’s lives, while the larger, and ostensibly more important issues, like racism, adultery, divorce, domestic violence, rape, incest, murder, serve as a backdrop or a by-product, kind of blurry and slightly surreal. This makes the experience of reading the stories more like scientific observation, as opposed to emotional engagement. I suspect this is the author’s intent.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Watson still manages to insert scattered moments of dry, offbeat humor. Particularly in "The Misses Moses," in which a would be renter is doted upon by two spinster sisters or the opener, "Vacuum," wherein all hell breaks loose when a depressed mother of three nearly falls for the charms of an opportunistic neighbor. Ultimately though, both tales end on a poignant note.

I tend to shy away from contemporary short fiction, finding it more difficult to connect with than novel-length works. However, I approached Watson’s work with an open mind and was rewarded with a collection that was both atmospheric and thought provoking. ( )