by Alex Carrigan
In his latest short story collection, Darrin Doyle shares five tales of people on the edge of completely collapsing inwards, like dying stars. The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions is a short collection wherein the protagonists of each story are beset by various states of mental, physical, or emotional distress and latch onto some odd object of desire. These can range from particular objects to fantasies to even specific acts. The stories in this collection read like examinations of people at crossroads, and whether or not they can find some peace in their haze remains to be seen.
The first story in the collection, “The Kaleidoscope,” is probably the closest to reading like a realistic scenario and manages to set the tone of the collection in a miasma of banality. Every story follows a male protagonist who balances their relationships with women and their arrested states through obsession and delusion. In “The Kaleidoscope,” our protagonist is simply a man settling into monotony with a freelance writing job in a rented duplex he can’t be bothered to put together. Most days are focused on eyeing dogs that defecate on his yard and barely responding to those around him. He’s not an entirely sympathetic protagonist, but his lethargy is painfully relatable, as if he’s living in an American remake of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
After that is “The Baby Doll,” which at the start almost feels like “The Kaleidoscope” but set a few years in the future. In it, a wannabe jingle writer engages in an affair while his wife and infant son are out of town and is entranced by an old baby doll he found in storage. If the last story was like American Murakami, this one comes off more like John Cassavetes’ Eraserhead. It’s the same sense of middle American arrested development but comes off as more twisted due to its unpredictable nature. The events are more random, but the emotion is more raw and the plotting is more disorienting.
The disorientation continues in “The Art of the Dead,” probably the most surreal story in the collection. In it, a street chalk artist continues his artistic ambitions despite public disapproval at a public event and threats from higher powers. This story carries a lot of the negativity and frustration of the previous stories and shows how artistic ambition can be stifled and how “mad” artists can be pushed further and further to the edge. It may be the most difficult story to read in the collection due to its nature.
“The Odds” feels like a come down following “The Art of the Dead.” However, it also plays with a lot of the previous themes and tone in ways that are at least a bit easier to swallow and more fascinating to examine. In this story, a man’s grandmother has a stroke, and in the leadup to her surgery, he engages in a disturbing past time. This is the one story without a romantic element, but one where the dysfunction is traced through the roles the characters play, such as the practical surgeon and the concerned grandson. The dysfunction has roots and it has blossomed on the vine, but what emerges from the buds is something that goes against civility and respect.
The final story of the collection is the titular “The Big Baby Crime Spree,” which is also the longest story in the collection. In this one, a hospital janitor and nurse engage in a meet cute and develop a relationship, bonding with one another with their hobbies and passions. The nurse is collecting letters from John Lennon fans to create a book she hopes will connect her to the larger Beatles mythos, while the janitor has spent years plotting a spree of crimes using some trivia he learned about babies. Both characters are the synthesis of the characters and themes from the previous stories. Both are affected by family issues, hone in on these obsessions despite their lack of actual fulfillment, and have delusions about being something grander than they are or are capable of becoming. This is probably the strongest story in the collection because, by the time the reader has reached this story in the collection, they have become submerged in the atmosphere of Doyle’s world and has come to accept all these grim realities. However, it’s in this one that this story that actually has something that the other stories’ protagonists don’t have: a chance at ending this phase of their life.
The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions may not be easy for the reader to immerse themselves in, but having read the collection twice and having examined the flow of the stories, Doyle’s collection feels more like a perfect unraveling. By composing these stories about societal alienation, arrested development, and resignation to banality, Doyle imparts a warning against delusion and obsession. The collection is unpleasant at times, but more in the haunting sense that what lies beneath the surface may not be anything vile or cruel, but simply empty and hollow. The Big Baby Crime Spree asks the reader to fill the void, but to also find a way to not let it expand and create a black hole.
Alex Carrigan (@carriganak) is an editor, writer, and critic from Virginia. He has had fiction, poetry, and literary reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Lambda Literary Review, Empty Mirror, Gertrude Press, Quarterly West, Whale Road Review, ‘Stories About Penises’ (Guts Publishing, 2019), ‘Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear’ (Et Alia Press, 2020), ‘ImageOutWrite Vol. 9,’ and ‘Last Day, First Day Vol. 2.’ He is also the co-editor of ‘Please Welcome to the Stage…: A Drag Literary Anthology’ with House of Lobsters Literary.
