Thrilling, Funny, and Sad Tales of Modern Manhood

Saying that a new Danny McBride project satirizes the trappings of modern American masculinity is like saying Kenny Powers loves his fixin’s, but when you’re right, you’re right: The new Danny McBride project does indeed satirize the trappings of modern American masculinity. Except this time, it’s not on TV.

In his debut short story collection Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, actor, comedian, producer, screenwriter McBride populates an entire book with the profane antiheroes he’s become known for on shows like Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones. And, for the most part, you can judge this book by its over-the-top cover. If you’re not a fan of the bloviating comedic stylings of Kenny Powers, Neal Gamby or Jesse Gemstone, you’re not going to like this short story collection. But if you’ve watched enough McBride TV, you know he loves to find the humanity and pain in characters who are walking ids.

Thrilling Tales of Modern Men  
By Danny McBride
Random House; 368 pages

Thrilling Tales consists of 10 short stories. Almost all of them revolve around a man facing down some perceived threat to his manhood. Divorce. A layoff. Failure to protect a wife. Hardly any of them have friends to talk to about their problems. Most are baffled by their children and are ashamed of how they raised them. A lot of their tales aren’t thrilling, they’re just thoroughly modern. (Cue the “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” scene from Fight Club.)

The absurd McBridian twists are in how each man deals with those affronts to their masculinity. One man deals with a divorce by becoming an illusionist whose whole act is just living in a hanging cube in a mall. Another man whose wife turns their bedroom into her office after his layoff takes his frustrations out on a mysterious boat that appears in their yard. In the story that gives the book its cover image, a man deals with the horrific death of his wife at the teeth of a carnival tiger by burning copies of a book he thinks is based on news coverage of the incident.

Through it all, McBride finds humor in the warped, inflated way these men see themselves in the world — “Maybe he was just paying better attention, or maybe his eyes were evolving, like how that fish had walked out of the water all those years ago,” the illusionist in the cube says of seeing in the mall at night.

McBride is well-suited for the short story medium, and he’s not afraid to end a story when it needs to end. Thrilling Tales is sometimes scary and often laugh-out-loud funny. It helps that I could imagine each joke being delivered in McBride’s signature voice.

Speaking of that signature voice, the main knock against this collection could also be said of Kenny Powers, Neal Gamby or Jesse Gemstone: All of the main characters are slight variations of the same person. Each man’s dialogue feels very McBride, even when kids are speaking it. Almost all of the men here are middle-aged, Southern, and presumably straight and white, although most of the characters are written so broadly they could be any man. But, much like those three characters, that’s the point. The humor (and the humanity) is in the familiarity; McBride is lovingly satirizing the culture he grew up in.

One of the final stories in Thrilling Tales is “Mr. Liptrapp’s Sword,” about a high school history teacher who finds a cursed saber buried in a Civil War battleground. This story, while reading like something Stephen King could have written for a men’s magazine in the 70s (McBride, who wrote the new Halloween trilogy and shares a screen story credit on the 2023 Exorcist movie, name-checks him in the acknowledgements), could also act as the thesis for the whole collection: American masculinity (specifically Southern masculinity) is a prison men create for themselves and then pass on from generation to generation, causing their undoing because they never question it.

The humor and understanding comes when we investigate that and learn to laugh at the absurdity of it all — even if you’re Kenny Powers.