Throughout Nada Alic’s debut fiction collection, “Bad Thoughts,” sunny facades belie strange, dark interiors. The stories feature a privileged millennial milieu in Los Angeles with all its carefully observed trappings – neutral linens at a baby shower, destination bachelorette weekends, social media obsessions, alternative wellness practices and a chic, spare loft “furnished with gray modular furniture resembling life-size Lego pieces.”
Alic’s characters fear environmental catastrophe and freely discuss mental illness, but it’s all casual, often glib. At first, superficial appearances, 280-character missives and quick fixes seem to take precedence over authenticity or real intimacy. “Their generation had become utilitarian, efficient, machinelike,” Alic writes about a couple in “Ghost Baby.” But eventually, each story pushes into weirder, more vulnerable territory as it captures the (usually female) narrator’s borderline perverse thoughts.
Alic depicts contemporary womanhood with a wry, uncensored voice reminiscent of those in Miranda July’s off-kilter SoCal tales.One narrator worries that “motherhood is contagious, like a parasite or the way cohabitating women synchronize their cycles.” Another fantasizes that a man in a ski mask lies on top of her and kills her. “As I die, I say goodbye to all the things I love most,” she imagines: “my niece, coffee and swimming pools.” There’s a woman who joins a kooky support group instead of confronting her crumbling marriage, one who makes it her mission to rub a stranger’s crotch, Uniform dating site and one who thinks about her dead cat and an auto-pay subscription she needs to cancel while her boyfriend performs oral sex on her.
Meanwhile, Dani’s “soft” boyfriend and her friend’s hip, dating-app-using dad wander in and out, more demonstrative with their feelings but hopeless with power tools
“My mother loved to tell me who had died, who had gone to jail, who had got out of rehab, and I could always hear her smiling with some sick joy about it, as if she were doing me a service, telling me,” Alic writes.