Salting the Map

I first ran into Alan DeNiro's work when one of my favorite literary journals, One Story, published his short story, "Child Assassin."  Based on my enjoyment of that, and the fact that I had a copy of his collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, on my shelf, I was pretty happy that Pinky nominated the title for the LBC.

In "Salting the Map," DeNiro seems to be writing something that could, to a degree, cover a larger theme of the complete book.  That is, the story takes a strong look at what is real and what is not, and hwo the two intertwine.  While this is certainly something that DeNiro seems to like to play with in his fiction, it is the dominant idea behind this story which falls late in the collection.

The phrase, salting the map, stands for creating fictitious cities and information on maps and their indices.  The protagonist of the story, Casey, is told he's doing so in order to allow the company to determine if their competitors are stealing from them.  The fictitious locales actually have a much greater importance for many of the folks working for the company, but that information takes some time getting to.

DeNiro does a very nice job of mixing this strange aspect of the story with the more realistic aspects - young man in a crappy job, his interactions with females, etc.  He also does a very nice job of comparing this world to the world of teenage Dungeons and Dragons, drawing interesting parallels with that.

It's a great collection and again, I found this particular story to be one that captures a great deal of what DeNiro seemed to be doing throughout the book.

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