2 out of 5

Nope.  Some people like this kind of oblique indie confessional stuff more than I do, perhaps the same people who like Jason, whose quote adorns the back of this collection, but I know it’s not really for me.  Taking that into account, though, ‘Other Stories’ still seems rather uneven for this sort of fare, pushing some key tales a bit too far into abstraction to be able to maintain an emotional vibe.  Dakota’s style varies between a pleasant Family Circle-esque simplicity and a more detailed style, generally for the backgrounds, which does give the book a pleasantly off-kilter balance, leaning just right of reality so the wandering whimsies of surreal and supernatural occurrences are fine rubbing up against the human characters – very often teen or younger children – around whom the tales generally revolve.  When the stories maintain a focus, they’re pretty effective.  Opener ‘Standing Water’ is a wonderful starting point, indicating how McFadzean can push his imagination to deliver a strange but poignant story about the seemingly one moving boy in a world of stillness, but then it’s backed up by the overlong ‘Ghost Rabbit,’ which structured, perhaps, too mirror the short attention span of its child lead, but this just stutters the momentum of the bit down to nil.  Similar focused / wandering pair-ups exist throughout: the slice-of-life ‘Boxes,’ probably a favorite in the book, as the growing-up-moving-on female lead felt like a real character and not just an idea of one, is followed by the ridiculously overlong ‘Unkindness,’ which goes for some kind of Twin Peaksy smalltown oddity (by my read) but can’t stick to a moment or character long enough to make the images or concepts really matter.  The unfocused tales definitely take up more pages than the focused ones, and then the feeling that none of the stories really struck me as approaching topics from a new direction (excepting, perhaps, ‘Standing Water’) add up to pushing me passed being able to give this collection a pass as something that just doesn’t appeal to me.  Sure, it’s not my bag, but I feel like there are better examples of this genre.