The Weirdos by Ottessa Moshfegh

Boom shakalaka 

I was glad to finally read something by Ottessa Moshfegh, who comes highly recommended and got a lot of buzz a few years ago with her novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Maybe I should have started there because The Weirdos didn’t really do it for me. The first paragraph is fantastic with one of those openings that makes you think, "oh, this is going to be good" and then it slowly unravels into a series of quirky little vignettes that never quite add up to anything satisfying.

To be fair, Moshfegh’s writing style is the clear highlight here. Her offbeat humor and deadpan cynicism are on full display and there’s a distinct cadence to the prose that keeps things moving along smoothly, even when the story itself feels like it’s wandering aimlessly. Unfortunately, the actual narrative feels thin, as if “weird” is doing most of the heavy lifting.

The female narrator is stuck in a miserable relationship, and her landlord boyfriend feels less like a person and more like a walking sketch. He is prone to bursts of random behavior like ordering a shotgun to deal with the crows supposedly taking over their apartment complex or rubbing his crystal skull for good luck. The “weirdos” of the title turn out to be a couple looking to rent an apartment (also embodying the quirkiness trait), and somehow the narrator ends up brokering the deal because her boyfriend is too busy attending auditions in his quest to become the next James Dean. 

By this point, the randomness stops being charming and starts feeling exhausting. Each odd detail seems designed to one-up the last, but instead of building toward something, it just piles on. Eventually, I found myself less amused and more annoyed, wishing the story would either settle down or give all this quirkiness a reason to exist. In the end, it felt like a great opening trapped inside a story that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be strange, satirical, or just obnoxiously random.

You can read this story HERE.