From Publishers Weekly: “Ed Park’s warm and winning fiction debut, Personal Days, is narrated by a collective we of youngish Manhattan office grunts who watch in helpless horror as their company keeps shrinking, taking their private world of in-jokes and nicknames along with it. Park may have written the first cubicle cozy.” 

From The New Yorker: “This comic and creepy début novel takes place in a Manhattan office depopulated by “the Firings,” where one can “wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window.” The downsized staff huddle like the crew of a doomed spaceship, picked off one by one by an invisible predator. Crippled by computer crashes (one worker suggests that the machines are “trying to tell us about the limits of the human”), the survivors eddy in a spiritual inertia; when one of them is banished to “Siberia”—a lone desk on another floor—no one can muster the energy even to reply to her increasingly anguished e-mails, until, one day, she is simply no longer there. Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request “Does anyone want anything from the outside world?”

Here’s a taste of Ed’s short story for At Home in the Dark:

THE THINGS I’D DO by Ed Park

1.

When I moved to the city, half a lifetime ago, I was excited, scared, confused—everything anyone is when they get here from somewhere else. Still, nothing else would do. What did I know, out in the sticks? My parents hated that I had to move so far away from them to become a cartoonist—at least that was their line. Every day I would sit in their basement, read the sleepy local paper, drive down the same dumb streets, thinking: Get me out of here. I made it into the police blotter a few times, my claim to fame, though no one fingered me as the artist sketching wieners on dirty windshields in the drugstore parking lot.

My dreams were about escape. I was trapped on a submarine, deep under the Atlantic. I was in a library, afterhours. I was in a library in a submarine in the belly of a whale.

I craved the city, or my idea of the city, which turned out to be the same thing: the dense mobs and vertical insanities, skins and tongues unlike my own, mountains of riches and canyons of depravity, the only place where you might be fêted and fetid in the course of a few hours. You can always count on a doodler for a fancy prose style.

2.

The day after I dreamt of a boulder sliding over the mouth of a cave, I called my buddy, Sal, who had moved to the city the winter before. We had known each other basically from birth.

It’s great out here, man,” Sal drawled. “Gray skies, broken windows, the works.”

“I was thinking of coming out.”

You totally should.”

“Can I stay with you?”

“I’d like nothing more.” Sal paused. “But the situation has its complexities. Seven living, breathing complexities.”

Sal meant roommates. “I thought you lived in a one bedroom.”

“Here’s an idea. We kind of look alike, right? So it has been said.”

“True.”

“All we need to do is not be in the same part of the apartment at the same time.”

“How would that work?”

“Don’t sweat it, kid. We’ll improvise.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I owe you one.”

“That’s the other thing. I’m a little short lately.”

“Aren’t we the same height?”

“I mean that you’d have to cover my rent. Playwrights don’t tend to rake it in until they’re in the game for a while.”

“How’s that going?”

“I’ve been workshopping it with a bunch of longshoremen. That’s not a euphemism.” Sal had a gig at the maritime museum. “Are we good on the rental front?”

What did I have to lose, except money I didn’t have? So I made a move. I stuffed a small suitcase, borrowed my father’s flask. There was a shoebox behind the safe, where the bulk of the cash was actually kept. The emergency fund, my mother called it. Wasn’t this an emergency, a crisis of the soul? I put the big bills in the lining of my hat, and stuck smaller denominations at random between the pages of the book I was bringing, Hypnos Wakens, a manual of mind control. I took some other things as well.

When the house was quiet, I slipped out and caught a bus to the city. I tossed and turned. Was there a patron saint of cartoonists? Would he or she accept my prayer? The fumes were getting to me. There in the darkness I switched my allegiance to Nyx, goddess of night, mother of Nemesis, Hypnos, and a slew of other deities. I scrawled my manifesto on the flyleaf of the book.

Twelve hours, a million stops, and I was there.

3.

Chez Sal was industrial space divided by bedsheets hung from clotheslines, with narrow “corridors” and a huge water stain on the ceiling like a map of ancient China. Light came in at weird angles, in different colors. It was the middle of summer, and we were on the top floor, but the place stayed weirdly cool. A breeze off the water? We were so far west we could probably jump from the roof into the river if we had to. There was an arcade game, a ripoff of Centipede called Crawlspace. There was a parrot named Crackerjack that belonged to nobody. Maybe it held the lease on the place.

Living in a state of indifference, hostility, and occasional outright anarchy were the seven complexities: Rodney (French but from Montana), Epp (East Texas), Cora (Florida), Yosh (from Germany, of Turkish ancestry), Vince (California by way of Canada), and Lol (Hong Kong, Lima, Pest). It was like a little United Nations in that room. Sal made seven. I was the phantom eighth, the one who wasn’t officially there. Put another way: I was Sal.

Sal and I didn’t look as similar as we did when we were kids, but close enough. I trimmed my hair in the same style, distorted my gait in imitation. Fortunately, Sal had a girlfriend, and spent weeks at a stretch with her. We didn’t see much of Sal.

No one really talked to me, except Crackerjack.

“The things I’d do to that ass,” it said, sounding like Groucho Marx.

It was funny, coming from a parrot. “What things? Whose ass?”

“The things I’d do to that ass.”

Later I wondered what kind of trauma the bird had been through. Crackerjack slept with its eyes open, claws gripping the fire escape. Now and then it would belt out a medley of “Copacabana,” “We Are the Champions,” “Happy Birthday to You.” Yash thought it was the devil incarnate and suggested we poison its food, except there was no food. Nobody fed it, as far as I could tell…

THE THINGS I’D DO by Ed Park is one of 17 stellar stories in At Home in the Dark. NB: Ebook and paperback editions are on sale now for immediate delivery. DON’T try to order the hardcover, as it’s sold out at the publisher, and while Amazon is still taking orders they’ll be unable to deliver.