Good People

Stories of lives lost and found at the crossroads of the ordinary, the bizarre, the tragic, and the comic

“Lopez has the ability to give the reader whiplash with his unconventional and bewitching stories.” —Los Angeles Times

“Robert Lopez is the master of deadpan dread, of the elliptical koan, of the sudden turn of language that reveals life to be so wonderfully absurd. Always with Lopez, the voice is all his—enchanting, surprising, at times devastating.” —JESS WALTER, author of Beautiful Ruins

“Robert Lopez’s strange, incantatory, visionary stories reveal the mysteries behind the ordinary world. You lift your head from this book and it’s as if a third eye has been opened.” —DAN CHAON, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we add: nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez’s unforgettable Good People. In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life’s unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway.

Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez’s stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity.

Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and the story collection Asunder. He lives in Brooklyn.