Earth Angel (Clash Books), by Madeline Cash, is the best and funniest debut collection of short stories I’ve read since Rebecca Curtis’s Twenty Grand. We are delivered in these fictions to an uncanny America where the familiar cultural, physical, and spiritual debris of the twentieth century mingles with the warped and warping phenomena of the present technoscape. As its title signals, there’s something old fashioned about Earth Angel with its echo of the sweet, beautiful, corny doo-wop ballad by the Starlighers. There’s also the sense of a visitor from another realm, someone trapped where they don’t belong, a being possessed of inhuman powers. Cash’s heroines are all earth angels but none so much as presence in these stories of the author herself, whose style has a devilish (remember Satan was an angel) and celestial powers, quite apart from the characters and scenarios Cash has imagined.
