Tales of the weird, each haunted by questions

In the title story of this weird and wonder filled collection Melissa Pritchard introduces Robert L. Ripley, the creator of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” a once-popular syndicated newspaper feature about strange but true facts.

Ripley made headlines in 1929 when he declared that the United States had no national anthem. The uproar resulted in the official adoption of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Ripley traveled the world in search of the oddball, but he had research help from a guy named Norbert Pearlroth.

Pritchard writes that Pearlroth spent 10 hours a day, six days a week fact-checking in the New York Public Library. Pearlroth did his job devotedly for almost 52 years, taking his wife on one vacation, in 1933 to the Chicago World’s Fair, where Ripley’s first Odditorium (e.g. a corkscrew man, a two-headed baby) was displayed.

	“The Odditorium, Stories” by Melissa Pritchard Bellevue Literary Press, $14.95, 252 pp.

Pritchard’s stories inventively fuse historical fiction with mystery or horror or the supernatural.

In “Watanya Cicilia,” she writes about the quiet friendship between Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull when they toured in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. The story title is Sitting Bull’s name for Oakley, meaning “Little Sure Shot.”

“Each story has an ethical question at the heart,” Pritchard said in a phone interview. “It’s interesting that humans create mythologies to turn away from the truth of what is going on. So they create this other narrative so they don’t have to look at the ugly reality of genocide.”

She was referring to Buffalo Bill Cody’s show papering the American myth of the Wild West over the military’s genocide of Native Americans.

Pritchard, a professor of English at Arizona State University, raises a question in each story: Why are we so cruel to one another? “Every story has this moral weight. There’s no answer. Answers don’t give you powerful fiction. Questions do,” she said.

The centerpiece of the collection is the novella “Captain Brown and the Royal Victoria Military Hospital.”

It is based on her naval officer grandfather running a hospital on coastal England just before and during the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Clarence Brown, her grandfather, and the sprawling hospital were real. But Pritchard takes them into what she called “a stately, slow … old-fashioned story.”

The hospital is haunted. Fictional Capt. Brown encounters a German officer, a prisoner of war, to whom he recites Goethe’s “Prometheus” and an injured female French-Jewish resistance fighter whom Brown gives by-the-book medical help but nothing more.

Pritchard is an award-winning author whose two previous collections were named New York Times Notable Books. She’s also a member of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, which helps promote literacy and education for Afghan women and girls.

Melissa Pritchard reads from “The Odditorium” at 3 p.m. today at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW.