The title of Danny McBride's Thrilling Tales of Modern Men is something of a misnomer.
The modern men at the center of these stories aren't exactly thriving. Most of them are in some state of crisis. They're getting older. Their marriages have changed. Their careers haven't gone as planned. The world around them is changing, too, and they're no longer entirely sure where they fit into it. As you can imagine, they don't always handle this particularly well.
There's the recently divorced dad who decides it's finally time to pursue his dream of becoming a magician. He quits his job, blows through his savings, and plans a “grand illusion” that involves being suspended inside a clear cube at the local mall. As one does.
An aging widower's children worry about him living alone, so they get him a high-tech robot assistant. He wants absolutely nothing to do with it.
Another man has lost his job while his wife has become the primary breadwinner. She's even moved their bedroom out of the master suite so she can use the space as her home office. After he's embarrassed at the state fair while trying to defend his son, a neighbor parking a boat in the empty lot between their houses becomes the thing he decides he can actually do something about.
Then there's the man losing his hair who's willing to do pretty much anything to get it back, including trusting a mysterious company that won't explain exactly what they'll do to him. Because that sounds like a good idea.
And there's plenty more where those came from.
McBride comes from a comedy and screenwriting background, and you can definitely tell. These stories are absurd and often very funny, but the men themselves aren't completely ridiculous. Or at least the reasons they're behaving ridiculously aren't.
Something recognizable runs through all of them. The fear of getting older. Of becoming irrelevant. Of realizing your life didn't turn out exactly the way you thought it would. McBride takes those pretty ordinary insecurities and then lets his characters make some spectacularly bad decisions because of them.
Like most short story collections, some of these worked better for me than others. I also found that the deeper I got into the book, the more familiar the characters felt. McBride definitely has a particular kind of modern man he's interested in here. Change the circumstances, give him a different crisis, and eventually you start to recognize the guy.
Still, I had a lot of fun with the collection. For as much as McBride pokes fun at these men, he seems to understand them too. They're frequently their own worst enemies, but you can usually see how they got themselves there.
I listened to the audiobook, which features a full cast, and I'd argue that's the way to experience this one. McBride's screenwriting background comes through in the dialogue and situations, and having different actors bring each story to life only adds to it. At times, I almost forgot I was listening to an audiobook at all.
Maybe that's why the whole collection worked as well as it did for me. These aren't exactly thrilling tales of modern men. They're tales of modern men trying very hard not to completely lose it.
I guess that's close enough.
For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads.
(2026, 89)
