How to Carry Bigfoot Home

Book excerpt: The Juno Award–winning musician and Pushcart-nominated author offers thirteen “otherworldly tales that speak to deeper human truths” (Time Out New York). The thirteen stories in Chris Tarry’s richly imagined debut, How To Carry Bigfoot Home, lay bare the insurmountable forces that determine who we are and who we become. From an out-of-work dragon-slaying father in “Here Be Dragons” to a family arguing aboard a rocket ship in “Topics in Advanced Rocketry,” the stories use fantastic settings, blazing wit, and imaginative circumstances to explore very human truths. The stories work to reconcile the public self with the private heart. To contemplate the monsters we carry home and lay bare for the ones we love the most. “These stories hilariously and poignantly evoke the way, when it comes to relationships, all men are living under a leaky thatched roof with winter on the way, always believing they’re on the edge of a turnaround, even though failure keeps returning like an old friend back in town.” —Jim Shepard, Story Prize–winning author of The World to Come “The stories in How To Carry Bigfoot Home are fruitfully obsessed with maleness . . . In their gleeful linguistic play and surrealistic vibe, Tarry’s tales remind me of those of George Saunders, but he’s up to his very own wonderful thing in this vivid debut.” —Pamela Erens, author of The Virgins and The Understory “What would happen if some mad scientist were able to fuse the otherworldly exuberance of H.P. Lovecraft with the nuanced pathos of John Cheever? . . . A writer named Chris Tarry.” —Stefan Merrill Block, author of The Story of Forgetting and The Storm at the Door