DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM, by David Sedaris

I've been re-reading the essays of David Sedaris, who gleefully distorts events through his unique sarcastic kaleidoscope. In DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM, the front blurb lists some of his seemingly normal activities. He plays in the snow with his sisters, he has his blood sugar tested, he gives directions to a lost traveler. The devil is in the details, and Sedaris recounts that he and sisters were locked outside for hours in the snow by their exhausted mother. His blood sugar was taken by a deranged man who mixed up the number for Sedaris' housecleaning service with that of a gay pornographic one. And he helps a lost tourist in one of my favorites, "Nuit of the Living Dead.”

Sedaris is afraid of zombies, and whenever alone at night in his isolated Normandy house, he works instead of sleeping, listening for shambling footsteps. One night a van of lost tourists drives up and he welcomes them in. Then he begins to imagine what the visitors must think of him. He's been assembling a plastic model of the Visible Man, and the intestines are lying on the table underneath a taxidermied chicken. The visitor seems put off by the meathooks inside the antique fireplace, and then Sedaris notices that a cleaver lies suggestively on a child's picture.

By the time Sedaris moves aside a monkey's skull in order to show his maps, I was in snorts of laughter. Sedaris has shared his fascinations with morbid medicine, monkeys, and taxidermy in earlier essays, and they seemed fairly normal then. Only when he imagines the viewpoint of his visitors do they become creepy.

Don't miss David Sedaris. His world is just like ours, except viewed through the eyes of a mad scientist, or a traveler in fear of one.