sorry i worried you
university of georgia press (october 2004)

A 2003 winner of the annual Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. In these twelve disconcerting tales, Gary Fincke reconciles lost hope and quiet despair with small blessings and ultimate redemption.

The characters in Sorry I Worried You work at strip malls, pilfer expired beer from landfills, and grapple with ill health. Within this world, as easily as one man becomes a hero, another is riddled with failure. Everyone and everything is suspicious, and only the luck of the draw determines who, if anyone, will survive.

In the title story, Ben, a fifty-year-old bookstore clerk facing the possibility of prostate cancer, feels his life spiraling out of control as he endures his female doctor's examinations with childlike embarrassment on one hand and struggles to conceal his age from his teenybopper coworkers on the other. Ben's only consolation is that "every day he heard about something a hundred times worse." In "Gatsby, Tender, Paradise," a character encounters a group of lightning strike and electrocution victims and feels lucky to have survived several light-switch shocks—the same type of shocks that have permanently disabled one man in the group. Such are the small but important blessings that ultimately rescue these men from despair. Fincke articulates both our constant, mortal desire to transcend ordinary experience and our simultaneous comfort in the unremarkable and familiar.

Combining quirky dialogue, vivid details, and small moments of epiphany, Sorry I Worried You keeps readers both intrigued and off balance. The characters here are a bundle of seeming contradictions and complications, often plagued by chronic ailments and a sense of loss. Fincke’s background as a poet is obvious in his use of elliptical dialogue and arresting images, and his brainteasers often mask an underlying yet subtly evoked sense of despair.

“Gary Fincke writes wonderfully quirky, unpredictable stories full of vivid characters and unforgettable details and moments. There’s a lovely, hilariously wry sense of humor at work here, but there’s also a truly heartfelt compassion for the lives of ordinary working folks—those little failures and triumphs that make a reader gasp in both recognition and wonder. This is a remarkable collection.”

—Dan Chaon, author of Among the Missing and You Remind Me of Me