Come Back, Dr. Caligari

First British Edition
Come Back, Dr. Caligari is a collection of fourteen stories, and anyone who imagines that he knows from that what to expect hasn’t read anything by Donald Barthelme.
Dr. Caligari, for instance, hardly appears in the book. What does appear is an original talent of quite extraordinary vigour, a writer who can surprise you at every turn with some completely unexpected twist of language or thought. Furthermore, the surprises are not just for kicks. If the surface of the book is as brilliant as a firework factory going up in flames one has still to reckon with the fact that Donald Barthelme is no ordinary pyromaniac. He ignites with precision; and if he uses words and narrative devices like no one else he does so because he is saying things no one else has said. As in the ‘theatre of the absurd’, there is a serious and subtle mind at work. It emerges in many strange ways and sometimes (as at the end of the story called For I’m the Boy Whose Only Joy is Loving You’) those ways can be alarmingly macabre.
All the stories in this book (which is the author’s first) share a hard and brilliant surface, a marvellous black humour, a half-delicate, half-ferocious emotion. Mingling the grotesque with the matter-of-fact, they produce in the reader an immediate, exciting sense of encounter.