Baby You're Gonna Be Mine

By Kevin Wilson, Ecco, 2018, 288 pages
Reviewed by Julie Bookman, June 16, 2020

I caught on to Wilson, a writing professor at The University of the South, when I reviewed this perceptive short story collection, which is recommended very enthusiastically. (More and more, I am enjoying short stories these days, and can I just add that The New Yorker has been killing it with their fiction choices of late?)

Anyway. Some of “Baby’s” stories share a theme: the relentless pain of an aging parent burdened by “Where did I go wrong?...How did I raise such a fuckup?” In a number of stories, the older parent is still and always trying, but forever unable, to fix things or steer his/her adult “child” toward making better choices.

In the title story, a penniless (once successful) indie rocker (now in his late 30s), has come back home to live with Mom. In another story, an elderly father struggles to get a floating dead deer out of his adult son’s pond before company arrives — and while he’s doing it we flash back to some of the previous awful episodes he has endured, always while trying to stop the angry and abusive son from hurting others and further wrecking his life.