By Eva Ciabattoni

“All my stories are about death,” said Eric Puchner, instructor of a Stanford Continuing Studies seminar about breaking the rules of fiction, where I was happy to find a fellow Los Altan and Town Crier contributor.

The class had been given the assignment of writing an excerpt from the point of view of an inanimate object. Puchner’s statement was in response to my question of why a pretentious toaster began to tell his life story, when my goal was to write something grand, perhaps from the point of view of the American flag. The flag sulked but the toaster blathered on, explaining how much he hated when people checked their teeth for spinach in his shiny chrome, how he deserved a granite countertop to stand on and how a toaster was the unsung hero of World War II. Puchner maintains that you can’t choose what you write, it chooses you.

Fortunately for readers, Puchner was chosen by a colorful cadre of characters in his debut short-story collection, “Music through the Floor” (Scribner, 2006). Adolescent boys, a high school girl, a down-and-out caretaker, baffling and selfish parents, an ESL teacher determined to smash the culture barrier - these are some of the people who demanded Puchner tell their stories.

Short stories are a precision high-wire act, fiction without a net. Some short stories play it safe, never getting very far above the ground. Puchner takes huge risks that left me breathless to see if he would make it safely to the end in the stories “Children of God,” “Child’s Play,” “Animals Here Below” and “Mission.”

The endings of Puchner’s stories astonish. Some are achingly, hauntingly beautiful, like the ending of “Mission” - it’s like watching Puchner reach the end of the tightrope just as the clouds disperse and the sun sets behind him in a blaze of color. Puchner has this to say: “They may be the aspect of the stories that I’m most proud of; I work a hard time on the endings and almost never have any idea how a story will end when I begin. Eventually, you stumble across the right one, I think, if you work at it hard enough. Often, of course, stumbling across the perfectly surprising but inevitable ending means going back and changing the middle of the story as well, to lead up to it in a sly, untelegraphed way; it’s not just a matter of the last page.”

Puchner is one of the most cerebral writers I have ever read. His intelligence, his fascination with nearly everything and his considerable technical skills are deployed in the service of emotional truth, that resonant thrum of a short story firing on all cylinders described by writer/teacher Robert Olen Butler. In the stories about children or child-like adults, the thrum could shatter glass.

So as we follow the boy “into the burbling catacombs of fish” of the tropical pet store in “Neon Tetra,” we ache for the nameless boy; the ache only deepens as we come to realize that his father is using him in service of an obvious agenda - obvious to anyone but a boy yearning for his father and refusing to give up hope long after hope has floated belly-up to the top of the fish tank.

Only one story, “Diablo,” didn’t measure up to the rest of the collection. The story about a Mexican laborer felt labored and self-conscious.

“Music through the Floor” is available on www.amazon.com.