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Chapbooks thrill me. Perhaps it's because my imagination thinks this one must have been too dangerous (or too different or too wild and weird or too [insert cool adjectives here]) for the big press to handle. In fact, you really don't see much experimenting going on except by a few of the more established authors who may have had a wild hair to get out but would otherwise not experiment for fear of losing their readership. The vitality of any field depends on the scientists (in this case, word scientists) who are willing to buck old ideas or the same old ways of telling a story. Surely, there's more than one method to telling a story. One feels that the only way an R.A. Lafferty might rise up through the ranks today is through the small press. Yet, on the other hand, most of the "dangerous" chapbooks published today are dangerous merely for dangerous-ness' sake, which is to say, they're deadly dull.

Small Beer Press should be applauded for taking such a chance on Dora Knez's chapbook Five Forbidden Things, which falls somewhere in the middle of the "dangerous" chapbook spectrum though, thankfully, a little more toward the dangerous end. No classics as yet, but a small cult following seems imminent. The majority of Knez's fiction bucks the standard formula. Instead of character development and change, she focuses on the minute qualities of writing like metaphor, structural artifice and the aesthetics of language, sometimes becoming so involved in minutiae -- as the main character's obsession with flying in "Perpetual Motion" -- that one begins to wonder whether Knez is influenced by Nicholson Baker or by the oddness and madly spinning wheels of Stepan Chapman.

But there is a good reason for "formula" in fiction. Everyday we find ourselves mired in problems -- sometimes extricating ourselves, sometimes not. Fiction formulas show us a plethora of extrication mechanisms, so that, ideally, the fiction reader is better prepared to cope with the everyday. That is, unless the fiction reader is more enamoured by the problem than the solution, as in never-ending soap operas. It is no accident that Aristotle called it catharsis, nor that Joyce would later term it epiphany. Most of us want to improve our lives. Moreover, the formula can be made unformulaic and magical in the right hands.

Be that as it may, Knez does some interesting construction here without the use of scaffolding. What this means is that much of the work that works must use fewer words with which to build if the aim is to keep reader interest maximized.

Yet, regarding the form of the stories, there is change here, albeit the more difficult to implement: change within the reader. In order for such an artifice to succeed, the reader must be lured in. The drawback to this, however, is that the reader more apt to change had probably changed before reading the work.

The most emotionally potent tale here, incidentally, (and one Canadian award nominators should take note of) involves the formula, "The Good Housekeeper." An old woman loses touch with reality as she, so obsessed with order, topples a too heavy cabinet upon herself, which pins her to the floor. The task of setting order in her life weighs an impossible burden at her age and she has to give in to the ultimate disorder: Death, who pays her a visit.

"The One Forbidden Thing" calls up the myth of Bluebeard (whose wife can open all but one door in his house) in the weakest of the five stories, amounting to little more characterization in either character than "woman good, man bad" or "woman bad for liking man who is bad." It's too easy not to understand the other. Perhaps this should be considered an overly long prose poem. To bring back Aristotle for a moment, it is easier for one to change oneself than others; so a story that deals with a character without a fatal flaw within herself is flawed. How can anyone relate to her except the flawless? Who will cast the first stone then have time to sit down and read this? The flawless lead such busy lives these days.

"Vaster Than Empires" throws up an imaginative scaffolding: the seasons and their effect on the life cycle of plants. The title refers to lines 11-12 of Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress":

"My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow."

Trent Walters co-edits Mythic Circle, is a 1999 graduate of Clarion West, is working on a book of interviews with science fiction writers.