In his extraordinary debut collection, <i>Pure Slaughter Value,</i> Robert Bingham tracks the conscience of a generation that grew up educated, privileged, and starved for meaning. Bingham's strange sense of morbid fancy collides with a gutsy realism; the result is splendid wreckage: a young man is seduced by his first cousin (or maybe it's the other way around) at her brother's wake (&quot;The Other Family&quot;); a bored couple plot to kill a man during their ski-resort honeymoon (&quot;Marriage Is Murder&quot;); a yuppie banker risks his whole perfect life for an affair with a junkie (&quot;The Fixers&quot;); an insurance-company bounty hunter tracks down walk-aways from drug and alcohol rehab (&quot;Preexisting Condition&quot;); and in the title story, an eleven-year-old boy is caught at the exquisitely uneasy intersection of the safety of childhood play and the pain of grown-up love and longing.<br><br>These lean, potent stories are utterly original, and yet by turns recall Salinger, in their intellectual acuity, emotional depth, and wicked, dark humor; Fitzgerald, in their vivid chronicling of a new, restless social elite; and the work of &quot;transgressive&quot; writers, in their pervasive sense of the imminent possibility of danger and violence, even in the most civilized surroundings. Above all, the stories in <i>Pure Slaughter Value</i> mark the debut of a striking new literary voice--unsparing, bold, ironic, and true--that will haunt us for a long time to come.