Tom Nugent

The Strangeness Tom Nugent

In these 42 ?sudden fictions? ? fictional stories of about 500 words each ? Tom Nugent asks, among several other burning questions: ?Who put the dih in the dih-dih-dih?? He fails to answer the question, however. Still, he gives it his best. In one of the stranger narratives to be found in this thoroughly odd collection, a tormented English 101 instructor goes eyeball to eyeball with a tank full of floating jellyfish at the Chicago Aquarium. Can the ?jellies? help him understand the true nature of human reality? Other stories focus on a short-tempered man with a glass eye, a senile Irishman who triggers an outbreak of social mayhem at a gambling casino run by Ojibwas, and a heartsick jilted husband whose life changes forever after he watches a Baltimore Gas & Electric Company meter reader morph into a fire-snorting bull. What does it all mean? Nugent says he doesn?t know. He?s a journalist, novelist, short-story writer ? and the father of four astonishingly independent minded young women.