While Mortals Sleep

I was feeling very bittersweet when I finished reading the fourteenth and final Kurt Vonnegut novel on my backlog last December, happy to have experienced my favorite author's works in their entirety but glum that there was nothing left. Then I remembered all of those short stories he wrote, and just got pumped to check those out. After all, long before I loved Vonnegut the novelist, I appreciated Vonnegut the short story author. "Harrison Bergeron" and "2BR02B" have long been favorites of mine, so with several full collections of more short stories waiting for me, I could possibly be headed for some of Vonnegut's best stuff yet. Right?

This was not some of Vonnegut's best stuff. While Mortals Sleep contains sixteen previously unpublished short stories written by Vonnegut in the 1950s. That's a double red flag, right off the bat. For one thing, "previously unpublished" means that each of these stories was either deemed unfit for publication by magazine editors at the time or unfit for attempted publication by Vonnegut himself. For another, if these stories were written in the 1950s it meant they were written by a very young Kurt Vonnegut - the one who wrote Player Piano, my least favorite of his novels by far.

The good news is that While Mortals Sleep was an all around more enjoyable read than Player Piano. The bad news is that this wasn't by a large margin. The thing with all short story collections is that they can be wildly inconsistent in tone or message, and they can also be wildly inconsistent in quality. There is no unifying theme to the stories collected posthumously into While Mortals Sleep, aside perhaps from that ever-present Vonnegut theme of humanism, and the stories ranged from utterly forgettable to enjoyable but still fairly forgettable. Most of all, my issue with 1950s Vonnegut, both here and in Player Piano, is that he hasn't quite found his distinctive voice yet. That weird but wonderful blend of absurdity, tragedy, and optimism isn't present here. While the aforementioned "Harrion Bergeron" and "2BR02B" take place in imaginative future societies with inventive features, and while his novels would ultimately deal with - repeatedly - the end of the world, space travel, time travel, and other fantastical elements, every story here takes place in a much "smaller" setting. The protagonists here are phone operators and sales clerks, not eccentric billionaires or prisoners of war. The settings here are ordinary places in mid-century America, not other planets or post-apocalyptic New York City.

None of these were bad stories. At worst, they were a bit boring, but none made me regret obtaining this short story collection. Of course, if the next Vonnegut short story collection I read isn't more entertaining, I will be disappointed. Time will tell. For now, I really can't recommend this book to anyone but hardcore Vonnegut fans - so, of the people reading this, basically Sweeney and no one else.