A humorous collection of short stories, Survival House explores communism in the 1960s, popular literature such as The Scarlet Letter and As You Like It. “Cherry Pie” revolves around the narrator’s intense paranoia that he is seen as a pedophile after offering to buy two boys a slice of pie. The title story showcases a married couple in the pursuit of buying a ranch that survived the Survival Town test explosion in 1955, where also the husband and wife struggle to start a family, in which lovemaking scenes are played out simplistically and comically.

With refreshingly realistic dialogue, ordinary scenes presented in an extraordinary fashion, Wendell Mayo caps off the collection with “The World is Ending Yesterday,” where an American visits a Soviet Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile site in the Plokštine Forest after the Cold War.