When I read short story collections, I tend to read it in spurts. I like to break up the stories between other books so I remember each distinctly, and there's no confusion as to what happened when. 
 That didn't happen here. I just kept on absorbing it. And each story is so distinct that you will remember each of them as their own tale. Saunders's voice is almost simplistic, but there's more underlying meaning than what's on the surface. What seems to be a simple tale is an uncomfortable foray into being human--Money concerns. Failure. Desire. It's all those little things that we don't want to think about, that don't mean anything but at the same time define who we are. 
 The Semplica Girl Diaries sticks out as the most gruesome honesty of the collection. It's written in diary form, by a man who's struggling with money, and he experiences the full range of emotions. These emotions we all experience, but it means something else when it's put down on paper. How we deny envying our neighbors. How it would just be easier if we weren't around. How depression momentarily vanishes when we obtain a large sum of money. 
 Sticks is the shortest story of the collection, and packs the most punch. A father has a cross-like implement in the front yard that he decorates for holidays, but his obsession with decorating it just gets... weirder. Especially from the viewpoint of his children. 
 Escape from Spiderhead explores medical experiments on inmates. Feeling down? There's an injection for that! Also for fluidity of speech, or sex drive, or depression... it's scary for its subject, but even more terrifying in the way Saunders presents the material as "no big deal." (It's for science! Don't you want to contribute positively to society?) 
 And of course, Tenth of December, about a kid with a wild imagination and a cancer patient intent on ending it all. When it's ten degrees in the woods, you don't expect to find anyone else there--especially not a kid playing make-believe, or an old man without a jacket.