'Vanilla Bright Like Eminem' — by Michel Faber

My Glasgow, Scotland correspondent has been beating on me for weeks to read at least the title story of this 2007 collection by Michel Faber.

The book was originally published in 2005 in England as "The Fahrenheit Twins."

I finally did today and she was right — it's excellent.

The final short story of 16 in the collection, it's brief (seven pages, about 2,300 words) and begins with the following sentence: "Don, son of people no longer living, husband of Alice, father of Drew and Aleesha, is very, very close to experiencing the happiest moment of his life."

Catchy, what?

For all you know, so are you.

Not catchy, silly billy — very, very close to experiencing the happiest moment of your life.

Maybe this is it.

Anyway.

What makes this story so compelling to me is the way it views time — time present and time past, time future and time unimaginable — as an armature for a series of inevitable, unavoidable events cast in the temporal equivalent of stone.

Hugh Everett would approve.

Read the first five pages of the collection's opening story, "The Safehouse," here.

You can use Amazon's "Search inside this book" feature (click "Surprise me!" over on the left) to read two- or three-page-long chunks of the text, so you can get a sense of Faber's style.

Janet Maslin's September 13, 2007 New York Times book review is here.

Linda L. Richards interviewed Faber, going very deep, for January Magazine.

Google Books pages for the short story collection are here and here.