Richardderus reads Short Story Collections in 2013

I have a category called Orphans, which will still catch all the other reading I do in 2013. Thinking 60 reviews as my target.

My 2013 ORPHANED books ticker:




Then there's the the 75 Books Challenge for 2013, which will be non-fiction and non-genre-fiction books published in 2012 and 2013, plus recommendations from other 75ers.

My 2013 NEW books ticker:




I'm going to keep a mystery-genre thread over in Crime, Thriller, and Mystery forum, with a goal of 50 reviews. Way way way too many of my reviews this year, in all forums, were mysteries and thrillers, and while I love them, I don't want to get too rut-ified and read only those books while keeping up my self-made review writing census.

My MYSTERY & THRILLER books ticker:




THIS THREAD is the Short Story collection challenge, my first and so a ticker-to-itself thread, thinking 48 reviews as my goal. I'll keep the thread over in the Short Stories forum.

My 2013 SHORT STORY collections ticker:




Books are reviewed in post:

2. Volt: Stories...#2.

3. 420 Characters: Stories...#15.

4. Widow: Stories...#16.

5. I Got Somebody in Staunton...#19.

6. Miracle and Other Christmas Stories...#24.

7. Deep Tissue...#25.

8. A Curtain of Green: And Other Stories...#27.

9. Blue Ice...#28.

10. Full Frontal: to make a long story short...#30.

11. He Walked Around the Horses...#32.

12. The Iraqi Christ...#34.

13. Monday or Tuesday...#39.

14. Like and Subscribe...#42.

15. Scavenger

16. The Midas Plague...#49.

17. Life, On The Other Side...#55.

18. By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain...#56.

19. The Kentucky Stories...#57.

20. September at Wall and Broad...#58

Review: 2 of forty-eight

Title: VOLT: STORIES

Author: ALAN HEATHCOCK

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Description: A blistering collection of stories from an exhilarating new voice

One man kills another after neither will move his pickup truck from the road. A female sheriff in a flooded town attempts to cover up a murder. When a farmer harvesting a field accidentally runs over his son, his grief sets him off walking, mile after mile. A band of teens bent on destruction runs amok in a deserted town at night. As these men and women lash out at the inscrutable churn of the world around them, they find a grim measure of peace in their solitude.

Throughout Volt, Alan Heathcock’s stark realism is leavened by a lyric energy that matches the brutality of the surface. And as you move through the wind-lashed landscape of these stories, faint signs of hope appear underfoot. In Volt, the work of a writer who’s hell-bent on wrenching out whatever beauty this savage world has to offer, Heathcock’s tales of lives set afire light up the sky like signal flares touched off in a moment of desperation.

My Review: When reviewing collections, it's hard to know what to say about them whole and entire unless they're linked stories. With a group of stories like this book is, it's easiest and, IMO, best to adopt what I've called “The Bryce Method” in honor of an online friend who introduced me to the technique: A summary opinion, plus a short line or a quote from each story, together with a rating for the story. So as my summary opinion, I offer this: Bleak is not always to be avoided. Sometimes art needs shadows to prove there's light. These stories aren't feel-gooders, and shouldn't be attempted by those in need of uplift. There is none here, but not one of these tough, scrappy folks is gonna lie down and die any time soon. They're too scared of the God they're sure they'll meet on the Other Side.

The stories in book order:

“The Staying Freight” gives new and chilling meaning to “Took a walk, Be back soon.” Why? Coming back is going backwards. Winslow Nettles needs, and needs badly, to go forwards.

“Smoke” is a horrible moment in a no-better-than-you man's life, one that changes him forever and not for better. How can one human bear a burden of sin alone? Better, when you're afraid of the god that you've invented, to load some onto an innocent other. Horrifying, and just beautiful.

“Peacekeeper” brings justice to a world where there isn't any, courtesy of the local grocery-store manager turned Sheriff. Is lying always wrong? After reading this, you won't think so. A beautiful and thought-provoking modern morality tale, complete with purifying flood.

“Furlough” couldn't be more horrible: A man, not a dumb kid, leads a young woman to the kind of rough justice that makes a civilized person's stomach churn. That he hates it, that it is vile and cruel in his eyes, is probably worse than the resulting nightmare. Spare, elegant, and horrifying.

“Fort Apache” sets the purposeless present and the vacant future against the void inside adolescent souls and the results explode into fire, chaos, and that angst of inchoate longing that humans will do anything to escape.

“The Daughter” sets a mother lost to random accident, a daughter whose grief severs her ties to reality wile making the whole world painfully abrasive, and a mother-of-all-storms loose in a cornfield maze. Returning to life, such as it is, is always painful, but it takes the pain of a neighbor's child to turn the daughter's rage outward again.

“Lazarus” is the least successful story, to my mind anyway, but it's still head and shoulders above most anything else I've read this century. When a man is wreathed in the smoke of sacrifices to his vicious god, how can he offer moral guidance? By remaining empty. Then what's needed most, right then and there, can fill you up and come out for who needs it. “It's your song, son...It's not for me to name.” (p179)

“Volt” sets the Sheriff, sworn officer of the court, against everything her hometown's about, and against her own ideas of justice instead of the law, as she cooperates with the city cops in bringing a convicted felon/Iraq war veteran in for a court date.

...”One world was like it was back home, where folks ate cheeseburgers and kids had sleepovers and ball games and people went to work and got angry over stupid shit that didn't matter. Like their TV ain't no good, or they ain't got the right sneakers. Some shit like that.… But then there's another world, where folks ain't got a goddamn thing, and these motherfuckers'll try any damn thing to blow your ass to dust. Sarge says it was up to us to keep them worlds apart, and if we thought that shit that happened over there wouldn't make it back to some little girl's sleepover then we had our heads full-way up our asses. ...Supposed to rally us, I guess. ...But then I had to go back out that next day and the next and all I come to think on was how I ain't never had no sleepovers or ball games or none of that shit, and didn't none of it make a damn lick of sense.”

p204

Well. There it is. The people who fight for the rights of us all don't have the privileges of us few. And we wonder how come there are so many walking wounded out there screaming their pain with their guns and dancing to the tune of radio mullahs whose hate and bile spewing nonsense feels just like their listeners do inside.

These are beautiful and brave and sad and wrenching demands for anyone with fifteen dollars to spend on a frippery like a book, or with enough luck to live where there's a library, to pay attention.

Ours is not the only world. No oceans separate us from the enemies we've made within.

Oh dear. This might be ruinous to my wishlist, and if they're availble as ebooks, to my budget as well. I like short story collections, and don't get the opportunity to stumble across many.

I hate to be mean, but this is so worth your reading dollars that I hope your futile resistance collapses sooner than later.

You'll be the death of me, Richard :) Or of my finances.

My, my, my. Now that is one HECK of a review. Heading to thumb it right now!!

Oh, and add it to my WL. :)

>5 AnnieMod: Success! I haven't practiced my evil-genius laugh in vain.

>6 TinaV95: Thank you most kindly, Miss Tina!

Fabulous review of Volt: Stories, Richard! Your description of the book reminds me of Flannery O'Connor's brilliant Southern Gothic short story collections, which I adore, so I'll add this book to my wish list.

>2 richardderus: Wow!! This sounds like the kind of gritty stories I read and loved in American Salvage and Mrs. Somebody Somebody Richard. Thumb! And off to see if the library has it.

>8 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl! It's an amazing collection. II hope it finds its way into your house and onto your coffee table with celerity.

>9 brenzi: Thank you for the thumb! Yeah, I see a lot of similarity among those books. This one's even better than American Salvage, IMO.

Thumbed, and heading off to put this on the possible list. (I refuse to add to the TBR list until I read at least 12 from my shelves.) But then I just noticed it's from Graywolf Press....why didn't you say so? They don't publish nothing but good stuff.....so I guess it will have to go onto Mt. Toobie.

>11 tututhefirst: *gleeful pirouettes* I made Tina add a book! Wheeeeee!

Although, to be perfectly honest, I suspect the book will leave you pretty downhearted. Very very grim.

Gee thanks.....I just moved it back to spring/summer. refuse to read grim books in darkest winter.

>13 tututhefirst: An excellent policy, indeed, and why I gave warning. I think it's a spring read, myownself. I can't be as open to not-my-usual stuff in the summer as I am in the spring and fall.

Review: 3 of forty-eight

Title: 420 CHARACTERS: STORIES

Author: LOU BEACH

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: Within this collection of miniature stories, entire worlds take shape—some like our own, some hallucinatory fairylands--populated by heartsick cowboys, random criminals, lovers and drifters. In a dazzling narrative constellation, Beach’s characters contend with the strange and terrible and beautiful in life, and no outcome is certain. Begun as a series of Facebook status updates, 420 Characters marks a new turn in an acclaimed artist and illustrator’s career, and features original collages by the author.

My Review: “The Bryce Method” is named in honor of an online friend who introduced me to the technique, is a summary opinion, plus a short line or a quote from each story, together with a rating for the story. Here, since each story is essentially a paragraph, it's useless! But my summary opinion, I think, is still useful: Form following function is a nice idea in the material world, but can be a but precious in art. I think the author, in this collection, aimed for philosophical and hit it most often, but when he missed, he smacked nose-first into portentousness.

A lovely object, this book, just delightful in is cloth-covered boards, its blind-embossed decorations, its gold-foil stamped title, all wrapped in a very pretty four-color belly band with one of the author's cool collages on it. The text is set, 420 characters a page, in pretty and readable type, the paper is thicker than usual in today's budget-conscious world, and there are four-color mid-signature wraps of more of his collages; the design is quite nice! It speaks well of the publisher to have done this good a job on a story collection. (Boring endsheets, though, really blah gamboge things. Wish they'd done something better there.)

Since there's no way to quote from the book, I'll offer this complete story from page 86:

I rise at 3am to walk my bladder to the bathroom, then return to bed and wait for my face and pillow to come to an agreement. I lie on my right, my left, my stomach, my back, as if attempting an even tan, until I find the Goldilocks spot. The only sound is the hum of the planet, and the whistling and chirping of the little birds who live in my nostrils.

Any possessor of a fifty-plus year old bladder/prostate combo pack is likely to identify with that.

And because I love it, also because I suspect my fellow readers around here will resonate with it, here's the story from page 133:

I lay the book on the floor, open to the middle. It's a lovely volume, green leather covers, engraved endpapers. I remove my shoes and step into it up to my ankles, knees, hips, chest, until only my head is showing and the pages spread around me and the words bob up and down and bump into my neck, and the punctuation sticks to my chin and cheeks so I look like I need a shave.

Those aren't quotes, mind; those are the entire stories, the entire contents of the pages in question. And they are either gems of lapidary poetic prose, or schnibbles of vacuous nonsense. If you're in camp B, molest not the book, but camp A folks should probably just do One-Click right now because this isn't a good library borrow, it's a mineminemine book. I'm already plotting how to keep the library copy I have....

Review: 4 of forty-eight

Title: WIDOW: STORIES

Author: MICHELLE LATIOLAIS

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Description: BELIEVER BOOK AWARD FINALIST
�In prose shimmering with intelligence and compassion, Michelle Latiolais dissects the essentials of everyday life to find the heartbeat within.—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

�Widow is a hymn to reverence, simultaneously heartbroken and celebratory. Michelle Latiolais has given us the rarest item, a splendidly articulated masterpiece. —William Kittredge

�In this luminous collection of stories, the gifted Michelle Latiolais writes of loss in all its surprising manifestations. Widow is a devastation and a wonder.—Christine Schutt

�There is something mysterious about this book, as there always is in the writing that matters most. It eludes explanation. It illumines terrifying realities. Only because these pages seem nakedly willing to take the imprint of every emotion, no matter how ugly, do they possess this great beauty. —Elizabeth Tallent

The stories of Widow conjure the nuances of inner sensations as if hitting the notes of a song, deftly played across human memory. These meditations bravely explore the physiology of grief through a masterful interweaving of tender insight and unflinching detail—reminding us that the inner life is best understood through the medium of storytelling. Among these stories of loss are interwoven other tales, creating a bridge to the ineffable pleasures and follies of life before the catastrophe. Throughout this collection, Latiolais captures the longing, humor, and strange grace that accompany life’s most transformative chapters.

Michelle Latiolais is the author of Widow: Stories, a New York Times Editor's Choice selection, and two previous novels, including A Proper Knowledge, also published by Bellevue Literary Press. She is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California and an English professor and co-director of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine.

My Review: “The Bryce Method” is named in honor of an online friend who introduced me to the technique, is a summary opinion, plus a short line or a quote from each story, together with a rating for the story.

It's a hard thing to write about grief and the grieving process. It's not a blank, featureless, trackless waste as is depression; grief is a living thing, a changing thing, as the death-in-life of depression is not. Latiolais observes the grief of her characters as they cannot: from the end, the outside, the culmination of a process. Nothing is the same, no one gets better, and no punches are pulled; but the blank and purposeless state of living through grief is, indirectly, shown from its end and thus from a place of hope. No. You will never be the same person. Yes, you will (after the pointless suffering of grieving) have to work hard to invent a new self. But you can, you can indeed...and that's the best message to give someone in this heap of pain and pile of misery.

"Widow" is first up, the title story, and a beautiful expression of the utterly disorienting loss of a mate:

Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity--he might be there, that place she didn't think to look, hadn't worked hard enough to find....

p10, paper edition

She has been surprised by grief, its constancy, its immediacy, its unrelenting physical pain.

p13, paper edition

Marianne Wiggins says it best in a novel of hers: To love someone is to agree to die twice in a lifetime, to outlive nothing. What happens when one outlives a spouse is a shelf-life, gourd-like existence, dumb fleshy pumps...

p19, paper edition

Beautiful. True, speaking from my own experience as an AIDS widower of some 21 years. And yet marvelously unassuming and unshrill. I love it more for that. 5 stars

"The Long Table" examines the wreckage that an unhappy life flounders through to get to the simplest and most ordinary pleasures. 3.5 stars

"Boys" takes a grown-up couple to a male strip club, the man's idea of a treat for his lady-love; she experiences the last thing she expected, a meditative trip over the territory of motherhood. 3.5 stars

"Tattoo" packs a lot into a page and a half. A daughter remembers cruel words, a woman examines a man while he's unaware, two people communicate from glass-divided spaces. Gulfs that engulf...3 stars

"Pink" takes a woman who has lost a man into the strange world of a teacup and saucer exhibit, where she meditates on vaginas, labia, churches, and death. Very odd, and oddly affecting. 4 stars

"Place" accompanies a middle-aged widow early in her grieving to a church service for and by revolting little rich dweebs, a place she has come to feel something, anything, a mite of a bit of a corner of connection to people.

...she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk's bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs, flooding across the rough wooden floor, down the narrow wooden stairs and out into the old soil of the garden. No roses, no, she does not even ask to make roses, just dissolution; most any night she asks just for that.

pp47-48, paper edition

For all her culture's attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else's body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart...she doesn't want another body, she wants the body she loved, the forceps scar across his cheek that she traced with her hand, his penis, its elegant sweep to the side, the preternaturally soft skin. One wants what one has loved, not the idea of love.

pp53-54, paper edition

After contemplating the "moral" lesson of the story of Job, she leaves the church without speaking to or connecting with anyone save a fellow lost soul who looks longingly on her departure from the company of fools. 4.5 stars

"The Moon" is a strobe-lit vision of the solitary future of a young woman in a featureless present. 3.5 stars

"Crazy" limns the searing moment when one knows that one's dear and beloved spouse is being unfaithful. 4 stars

"Involution" accompanies a young woman to the chocolatier where she buys marzipan angels. Why, I don't know, and what's more I don't care. 2.5 stars

"Caduceus" is best summed up in this quote: "She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need."

Yuh-huh. 3.5 stars

"Thorns" takes an awkward, intelligent woman on a coffee date with a very average man, and leaves her there. Nucelar waste is vitrified, and Dale Chihuly invoked. In most collections this would be a stand-out; here, 3 stars

"Gut" made me laugh out loud several times. It's the only self-narrated story, and it's not about grief or loss but rather about the odd and chancy ways life offers us bliss. A biological anthropologist marries an artist and printmaker, develops some daring ideas about how the human brain evolved after we learned to cook our food, and whisks her--despite her deep misgivings and repeated attempts to foist the gift onto someone else--to the jungles of Uganda to eat a chimpanzee diet for 8 hours a day. Straight. No breaks.

Let me put it this way: Constipation was not a problem, but pooping while you ate was just not the kind of multitasking I was up to.

p104, paper edition

After an attack of wind at being overfed on fruit leads to an amorous escapade and a subsequent request from her husband that she eat living termites off a stick he fetches from under their cot:

...I looked into his blue eyes and they seemed as kind and loving and serious as ever. The acid came into my throat and I started to cry, deep throbs coming up out of my chest--the thought of divorce was so painful.

p 107, paper edition

Fortunately for their marriage, it's a gag, and this marriage is saved. A lark, a pleasure, a light and airy trip into Before instead of a voyage into After as the others are. 4 stars

"Hoarding" plumbs the depths of frustration at being the unfunny partner of the dead life of the party. Bargaining with the gods to bring people to her door, preparing for ungiven parties and unreceived invitations with cupboards and pantries stuffed with goodies, falling flat in pursuit of connections outside her reach, she knows how much was taken from her but can't stop grabbing something, anything, the next thing, to fill the hole. 4.5 stars

"The Legal Case" brings a horrible, horrifying truth about law into sharp focus: You can't legislate decency or goodness, and human depravity finds a way to escape boundaries every time. 3.5 stars

"Breathe" is a riff on "I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen, a young woman ironing the table linens and doing the laundry and thinking of the man sleeping in her bed, the grandmother burned in a forest fire, the revolting source of nylon, and then going to a bed she's too tired to care about. 3.5 stars

"Burqa" thinks of invisibility, of being just that bit too old and too over it to be relevant, even to one's child; a divorced woman living in a one-bedroom California apartment, how grisly a thought is that. Slight, in the end. 3 stars

'Damned Spot" doesn't feel like a story, so I don't class it as such. The author tells of her dear Bull Terrier named Damned Spot (she and her husband are bookish people, the joke appealed), and his journey through her marriage to its end, and his own death shortly afterwards. It's a moving story to a dog-lover, and a very sad end-of-life tale; but more than any other thing, it's a simple and direct and very clear statement of life's greatest need: To give and receive love. Absent that, there is no life, merely existence, and that is not and will never be enough. 5 stars

Hunt it up. Spend the fifteen bucks, less on Amazon. This is some excellent story-telling.

Excellent review, Richard! A few of those story summaries really spoke to me, having had my own terrible losses to contend with over the years. BTW, I worked with the author's husband and met Michelle when he died. It was a terrible tragedy and very sad, but, even though all the grief and pain, she was a gracious and lovely woman. I'm so glad her book is so well-received and will definitely go out and buy it this weekend. A trip to Vroman's will be a lovely treat!

A trip to Vroman's is never NOT a lovely treat, no? I'm so glad you liked the review, Mary. I am unsurprised that Miss Latiolais is as nice in person as you report. Her authorial voice comes across that way. I've requested her novel A Proper Knowledge from the village liberry, so I'll soon see if she's just a flash in the pan.

Review: 5 of forty-eight

Title: I GOT SOMEBODY IN STAUNTON

Author: WILLIAM HENRY LEWIS

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: In I Got Somebody in Staunton, the acclaimed William Henry Lewis brings us ten often sensual and always eye-opening tales. "Rossonian Days" follows a Kansas City jazz troupe to a gig in Denver, where they hope to strike it big. This story, itself a swinging riff, is also a humbling chronicle of the evolution of jazz and an incisive look at the history of America's racial divide. In "Potcakes," Carlos Stubbs is troubled and weary in the midst of paradise, obsessed with the incessant barking of dogs. He has a degree he's not using and a woman he's afraid to love. Time is passing, and he must decide whether he'll languish or thrive. "Kudzu" reunites a couple whose sweetly sexual relationship comes to an end when Evvie, a bohemian free spirit, "drove west, drove north, away from here" in search of something more compelling than her small Southern town could offer. And in the title story, "I Got Somebody in Staunton," a Black college professor, haunted by his dying uncle Ize's memories of lynchings and the ways of the old South, flirts with danger by giving a ride to an enigmatic young White woman whose long, blond hair is twisting into dreads.

With I Got Somebody in Staunton, Lewis has written stories that will catapult him into the first rank of American storytellers.

My Review: The publisher having kindly given one-line synopses above, I confine myself to a summary review. With relief, might I add.

Pleasantly euphonious sentences, mildly interesting ideas, and a very strong sense of place make the collection easy on the eyes. The writing is very much the point of the stories, though I won't for a second take away from the emotional impact of the stories chosen. "Shades," a coming-of-age tale featuring a single mom of ineffable coolness and a deadbeat daddy of loud and brassy commonness, is a pitch-perfect evocation of a teenaged boy's first brush with the pain of a separate, unique identity, one not dependent on his parents absent or present. Good stuff, rich and savory, very well crafted indeed.

But...and here's why I'm giving the collection 3 stars...I went back through the book looking for call-outs and quotes. (Y'all must've noticed that I like to use quotes to make my point about a book by now.) I found none.

Not a one.

Like eating a box of dates, or a pan of shortbread: Tasty, yes, but one bite is much like the next, which is much like the last, and nowhere except at the end of one date or cookie can one sense a shift in the textural flow.

Uniformly of high quality, the stories suffer from just exactly that: Uniformity.

Richard, you've convinced me. Usually I steer clear of stories on death and dying. Had enough grief in my life. Widow sounds absolutely beautiful though.

I can honestly say it is! Beautiful, and even though the subject isn't the easiest to imagine yourself enjoying, it's quite impossible not to enjoy Latiolais' gift for phrase-making.

Thanks for the reviews, Richard. Widow: Stories sounds really good. Me too, since the death of my best friend from ovarian cancer (and a friend dying now from brain cancer), I really tend not to read much about death (or cancer(s) in particular), but maybe I will try that one. I know literature can be soothing and helpful in a certain way, and I also know, death is part of being alive ... so I think that one may be worth a gander.

>22 CarolynSchroeder: Oh no, I am so saddened to hear of your losses. It's a truism that we none of us get out of here alive, but I still hate to hear of the early departures.

I found the book's resonances with my own life-losses very moving. Maybe you will too. I surely hope so.

Review: 6 of forty-eight

Title: MIRACLE and Other Christmas Stories

Author: CONNIE WILLIS

Rating: 2* of five

The Book Description: Connie Willis loves Christmas. "I even like the parts most people hate--shopping in crowded malls and reading Christmas newsletters and seeing relatives and standing in baggage check-in lines at the airport. Okay, I lied. Nobody likes standing in baggage check-in lines," she writes. Willis knows it's hard to write good Christmas stories: the subject matter is limited, the writer has to balance between sentiment and skepticism, and too many fall into the Victorian habit of killing off saintly children and poor people. Here she presents eight marvelous Christmas tales, two of which appear for the first time.

The stories range from "The Pony," about a psychotherapist who doesn't believe that Christmas gifts can answer our deepest longings, and "Inn," in which a choir member rehearsing for the Christmas pageant becomes part of the original Christmas story, to "Newsletter," where an invasion of parasitic creatures causes unusually good behavior in their hosts, and "Epiphany," a story of three unlikely Magi following signs through a North American winter toward the returned Jesus Christ. "Miracle" is a comic romance echoing Willis's favorite Yuletide movie, Miracle on 34th Street, and "Catspaw" is a homage to the traditional Christmas murder mystery with a sly, science-fictional twist. The collection also includes "In Coppelius' Toyshop," in which a bad guy is trapped in Toyland, and "Adaptation," a Dickensian story about what it means to keep Christmas in your heart.

My Review: How very handy! Another sales blurb that one-lines the stories, freeing me to offer my opinion of the collection.

Which is negative. Damn it all.

Yuletide is a favorite season of mine. I like cold weather, and fires in fireplaces, and decorating with all sorts of shiny, tacky thises and thatses all lit up by teensy white lights festooning the entirety of my living space. I like street lamps hung with snowflake-shaped flags, and wreaths on truck grilles, and peppermint ice cream. Especially peppermint ice cream.

Stories about Christmas aren't my usual atheist fodder, but I've heard so many good things about this collection...and I'm never willing to let a set opinion ossify without challenging it...so "try some more Willis" whispered the Personification of Evil, in a bid to render my holidays hideous. It worked. The humor here is forced, the wit is witless, and the shiny, tacky bright baubles that stories often are have been cracked by being dropped on the hard floor of ~meh~.

Connie Willis and I don't fit. I love her ideas, and I like some of her sentences, and I would deeply appreciate it if she stopped screwing things up by writing them half as well as they deserve. (This knock also goes for Neil Gaiman.) In fact, I would like some sort of legislative action to compel this sort of writer to generate ideas and then give them to others to execute.

As that is impracticable, I resign myself to the one course available to me that doesn't infringe on anyone's civil liberties: I'll avoid further contact with the irritant, in this case Willis's ~meh~ execution of wonderful ideas.

Review: 7 of forty-eight

Title: DEEP TISSUE

Author: JEFF TAPIA

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: Jeff Tapia’s collection Deep Tissue is written in a preposterously excruciating style that mimics the often preposterous and excruciating everydayness of modern life. In the title story, a man seeks revenge against his soon-to-be ex-wife by destroying her new kitchen appliance. In “Fear’s,” a disgruntled security guard asks his good-natured buddy to help him cut off his foot. The middle-aged woman in “The Dark Continent” keeps the lump in her breast a secret from her new partner only to discover – belatedly – that he has a secret of his own. Mimicking the soulless rummage of the information age, Deep Tissue explores the poignant needs and desires of everyday people engulfed in a phony world.

My Review: My favorite of these stories is "Horns Overflowing." In light of the recent Steubenville rape-story idiocy, the story of a married couple's Thanksgiving meal with the shade of their imprisoned son had an even greater impact on me than it might have otherwise.

Walter tells Rex not to worry about it. He says he really wants to come in. He says he can tell his wife wants to talk about their son again. Walter asks Rex if he ever told him he even had a son. Rex answers. Walter asks him if he remembers the story about the frat-house rape. Joan gets a sick look on her face. Walter tells Rex it was in all the papers. Joan gets up from the table. Her chair tips back against the buffet, and her napkin falls to the floor. Joan does not pick it up. Joan leaves the room. She goes into the kitchen. The kitchen has both a pantry and a closet. Joan keeps things like the vacuum and the ironing board in the closet. Joan really wants a new bagless vacuum.

Marital cruelty. Material escape. Maternal avoidance. Masterful.

I read the collection slowly because there is only one style the author is working in, and you're looking at it. I like it. I don't, however, want to read all twelve stories in a gulp because comma-phobic sentence building isn't restful reading for me.

I'd say the author's strength is also his weak point, in that his style is so very integral to the stories being told. Everyday sentences adding up to quotidian revelations of petty emotional crimes. And the effect of all of them together is less than the pleasure of each considered in its own space.

Pick this book up, the Kindle edition's only $10, and read it story by story between longer books. These stories are very good, this writer has a voice (how rare that is!), and we should be happy to support him so we can see what he does next.

***Livingston Press gave me an ARC at my request.***

Oh this one sounds very good Richard and your review is well-deserving of a thumb. Well done sir. And I thoroughly approve of your ideal method for reading the stories. Ideally, I like to read them before I go to sleep but by that time I can't keep my eyes open so that method doesn't produce great results.

Review: 8 of forty-eight

Title: A CURTAIN OF GREEN

Author: EUDORA WELTY

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Book Description: In her now-famous introduction to this first collection by a then-unknown young writer from Mississippi named Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter wrote that "there is even in the smallest story a sense of power in reserve which makes me believe firmly that, splendid beginning that it is, it is only the beginning." Porter was of course prophetic, and the beginning was splendid. A Curtain of Green both introduced and established Eudora Welty as in instinctive genius of short fiction, and in this groundbreaking collection, which includes "Powerhouse" and "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden," are the first great works of a great American writer.

My Review: Her first collection of stories, published *the same year* as her first story appeared in print! ("A Worn Path" in Atlantic Monthly {as it was then}, in 1941.) Diarmuid Russell, the superagent of his era, sold the collection on the strength of that...to a friend of Miss Eudora's who was working at Doubleday, Doran (as it was then). That, laddies and gentlewomen, is damn near inconceivable to today's publishing professionals. A collection by an unknown barely published writer getting published by a major house? Who's she sleepin' with?

The Muses. She was a gifted writer, and stories were her perfect métier.

It's a first book, though, and no matter how hard one tries, there is the inevitability of imperfection and probability of overexuberance. Here:

Night fell. The darkness was thin, like some sleazy dress that has been worn and worn for many winters and always lets the cold through to the bones. Then the moon rose. A farm lay quite visible, like a white stone in water, among the stretches of deep woods in their colorless dead leaf. By a closer and more searching eye than the moon's, everything belonging to the Mortons might have been seen--even to the tiny tomato in their neat rows closest to the house, gray and featherlike, appalling in their exposed fragility. The moonlight crossed everything, and lay upon the darkest shape of all, the farmhouse where the lamp had just been blown out.

first paragraph, "The Whistle" in A Curtain of Green

That's a lovely word-picture, and a kind of eerie mood-setting image. It's also too long and just a widge overwritten. But the story, a chilling little piece, is plenty interesting. It's always good to have an isolated farmhouse with a married couple basking in pale moonlight when something unexplained and menacing in its unexpectedness happens. The story left me physically chilled. And it's not her best work.

I am a major partisan of "Why I Live at the P.O." as among the great stories of the American South's culture. It's a flawlessly built, amusingly written moment in a family's life, a piece of time that any Southern boy with sisters or maternal aunts can not only relate to but practically choreograph.

So I hope to tell you I marched in and got that radio, and they could of all bit a nail in two, especially Stella-Rondo, that it used to belong to, and she well knew she couldn't get it back, I'd sue for it like a shot. And I very politely took the sewing-machine motor I helped pay the most on to give Mama for Christmas back in 1929, and a good big calendar, with the first-aid remedies on it. The thermometer and the Hawaiian ukulele certainly were rightfully mine, and I stood on the step-ladder and got all my watermelon-rind preserves and every fruit and vegetable I'd put up, every jar.

"Why I Live at the P.O." from A Curtain of Green

Two sisters have a spat about a man, and the family weighs in. Hijiinks ensue. It's a chestnut now, it was a chestnut then, and it's damn good and hilarious.

This is my idea of a good story collection, and the writer who created this first crack out of the box is my idea of gifted, and there is not one thing I'd say to her except "well done, Miss Eudora" if she stood right here in front of me, not one little hint of a frown or trace of a doubt in my voice. Make those mistakes and make 'em big, Miss Eudora, because if this is the FIRST then the BEST is gonna knock "good" right into "superb."

And it did.

Review: 9 of forty-eight

Title: BLUE ICE

Author: BRIAN DICE

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: How would our social relationships change if we could inhabit online personas indefinitely? How would a piano virtuoso adapt when called upon to serve his country on the field of battle? The stories of Blue Ice take the reader to both recognizable places in the world and new locales of the mind to explore the triumphs and heartbreaks of humanity.

My Review: I am acquainted with Brian Dice through Goodreads, though it took me a year of chatting back and forth to realize that Brian-the-Avatar-on-my-feed was author of a story collection. Shameful! When I did realize this, I asked Brian to send me a copy of his book.

When it came, I was duly impressed. He's published the book himself, and hasn't stinted or cheapied anywhere. *Lovely* jacket design. Handsome cloth--cloth!--binding. A top-notch job.

And then I read the stories. More accurately, I shouted imprecations at Brian as I headached my way through the SANS-SERIF TYPE he's set the stories in. Seriously! Sans serif. Miserable to read more than 500 words in sans serif. The typos (all books have 'em now) are reasonably minor...I for one don't care if the whole world misspells "Hemmingway" forever after...and the homonym-switching isn't up to the flinch-and-wince level..."veil of tears" is in place of "vale of tears," inducing only a sigh. I did get thin-lipped over "$250 dollars" because, damn. That little dingus in front of the numeral? That's a dollar sign and that means dollars so don't say it again.

So knowing that, please understand the full import of the four-star rating I've given the book.

"Calliope," a wonderful caprice about Salinger's real reason for not publishing anymore, returns the authentic Greek meaning of A Muse to the modern world. Darkly funny. One doesn't mess with a divine being. There is no way to win.

"Blue Ice," the title story, is also darkly funny...a second-rate academic, his low-class harridan of a wife, and his snot-nosed kid are invited into a gracious Japanese businessman's home during a vacation there, and despite their horrible manners they're presented with a rare and valuable gift: A piece of blue ice. Antarctic glacial blue ice? Maybe. Maybe not. Heh.

"Concert Pianist" sets the man of the title in a jungle in Viet Nam. A soldier who is about as poorly suited for the job as anyone in military history, Dub (no one calls him Milton Parker any more, but they don't remember how he came to be called Dub either) was on his way to a real career when he got drafted and refused to evade the sentence. More's the pity, it's the real Viet Nam he is sent to. War wastes lives, talents, brains, and it's always been that way.

Those three are the stand-out stories among the ten here. A slim 140 pages, the stories are models of concise tale-telling, and all are worth reading. A lot of pleasures are to be had here.

Enjoying this thread Richard - been meaning to post here for a while. I've thumbed your reviews of A Curtain of Green and Blue Ice - both books look like very interesting collections. I'm still a Eudora virgin I'm afraid - us Brits don't really hear much about her, but I intend to correct that wrong! Brian Dice sounds like a real talent.

Review: 10 of forty-eight

Title: FULL FRONTAL: to make a long story short

Author: TOM BAKER

Rating: 3.5* of five

The (Self-)Publisher Says: It is August of 1957, and Tim Halladay, a caddie at the Long Shore Country Club, is looking forward to beginning eighth grade at Assumption School. Tim and his best friend and fellow caddie, Jimmy, are oblivious to the fact that they are slowly transforming into young men with secret desires.

As Tim embarks on a journey of emotional and sexual development, he approaches the world around him with a "full frontal" attitude that allows him to somehow not only survive but thrive, beginning with his first gay experiences as a shy teenager in suburban Connecticut and moving through his escapades at a Virginia army base, the Hotel Manhattan, the Museum of Modern Art, the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and lavish suites at various upscale hotels and resorts. As Tim moves from one encounter to the next, he gradually transforms, moving toward a future as a rising star.

Full Frontal shares an intriguing glimpse into the life of a gay man, as told through his eclectic relationships as he eventually discovers that true happiness is all about give and take.

My Review: What happens when history isn't recorded by Official Sources? When the world as it is gets painted and groomed and tarted up for Posterity? Go look in a history book, that's what happens. No juice, no life-as-it's-lived-ness remains, just a skeleton of facts and some fatty tissue about the one-percenters' public actions.

In recent years, historians have discovered the joys of nosing into the private lives of ordinary people via their diaries and their letters. Jeb and Dash, a non-fiction work about two gay men who lived, loved, and larked about between the World Wars, is a fun and interesting look at life otherwise unrecorded and unseen by History-with-a-capital-H.

Then there are books like Full Frontal. Short stories, fictions, that read like entries in your gay uncle's diary, and give you the naughty-naughty sensation of finding the book and sneaking a read of it before he gets home.

The ordinary life of an ordinary young man, coming of age and coming into himself, is usually the stuff of nightmares to read, listen to, or watch. We've all come of age, well most of us have, and we've all had our issues large or small with crafting an identity to suit our sense of self and place in the world.

Here, in these stories, Tom Baker (yes, THAT Tom Baker, Whovians) brings a character into focus, sometimes sharp and others soft, whose ordinary lived life as a gay man of the Stonewall generation is vanishing from the earth. This subject isn't utterly fresh and new, goodness knows, since there have been about a Roman Legion of gay-male writers mining the shaft (in joke, don't fuss if you don't get it) in the past 40 years. What makes this book different, and altogether more satisfying on one level, is the absence of angst in the tale.

Tim Halladay was born gay, came of age finding and spending time with other boys who wanted what he wanted, and there's an end to that drama. He's a bit shy, a little bit awkward physically, and pretty much a common-or-garden modestly talented dreamer of dreams.

And that is a lovely thing to find between book covers. I've known Tim Halladays all my life, and liked them, and found their company and their stories engaging and charming. Spending a few hours with this fictional man, now around 70 and looking back over the life he's led, gave me a happy, wistful glow. Most gay men don't have children to tell their stories to; Tim Halladay, the stand-in for many an actual man, found Tom Baker's pen and made it work for him. It's a pleasure to spend time in his company.


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Hi RD
This is a new venue for me.
*looks about*
I like it! I think I'll come back.

Review: 11 of forty-eight

Title: HE WALKED AROUND THE HORSES

Author: H. BEAM PIPER

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In November 1809, an Englishman named Benjamin Bathurst vanished, inexplicably and utterly. He was en route to Hamburg from Vienna, where he had been serving as his government's envoy to the court of what Napoleon had left of the Austrian Empire. At an inn in Perleburg. in Prussia, while examining a change of horses for his coach, he casually stepped out of sight of his secretary and his valet. He was not seen to leave the inn yard. He was not seen again, ever. At least, not in this continuum...

My Review: A fun introduction to Piper's large series of stories about the Martian colonization of Earth. He posits that Homo sapiens is, in fact, the remnant of an ancient Martian exodus from a used-up and cooling planet. Since, in 1948, the mere notion of sequencing the human genome wasn't so much as a glimmer in Science's eye yet, this would fly...but of course that day is done, what with the discoveries of just how interconnected we humans are with all life on Earth, and how very, very much less complex our own genome is compared with that of the average plant.

But in 1948 the notion that we, an order of magnitude more sophisticated than our vanished and presumed to have done so without a trace relatives the Neanderthals, were alien colonists and they were the inferior Terrestrial attempt to match us, would have appeal. It was the year that George Wallace the elder ran for president on a racist "State's Rights" ticket, and the year that *shudder* Strom Thurmond was first returned to the Senate. Notably, all the people in the Paratime stories are white. Hmmm.

This story is told from the multiple points of view of the befuddled local-time-line officials who have to deal with a seemingly mad yet clearly genuine British diplomat bearing the most outrageously, insanely off-kilter credentials and spouting arrant nonsense with evident sincerity and admirable consistency and aplomb. It's a clear case of "not on MY desk" as Bathurst (whose local timeline self is away in the Crown Colony of Georgia) is passed higher and higher up the food chain. No matter how high he gets, the incumbent bureaucrat wants the terrifying responsibility for deciding what to do with the poor man to reside higher still.

In the end, poor Bathurst is confronted by Prussian madness doctors (chilling thought, isn't it?) with clear evidence...local newspapers...that his world is a delusion. Psychic crisis much? The ending is, in and of itself, a bit unfair; but as the story sequence moves on, it's clear in hindsight what actually occurred.

Flawed considered in itself, in the Paratime context, with its explicit laws about protecting the Paratime Secret of interdimensional travel, the story sets up a fun and often funny set of romps through all the possibilities of human history.


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Well, haven't I been the neglectful landlord. *sigh* Good thing the "Started by You" feature was introduced on the Talk page!

I am bumfuzzled by the complete lack of collection reviewing I've done. Time to crank 'er up again!

Review: 12 of forty-eight

Title: THE IRAQI CHRIST

Author: HASSAN BLASIM

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by an insurgent into the ultimate act of terror…

A deviser of crosswords survives a car-bomb attack, only to discover he is now haunted by one of its victims…

Fleeing a robbery, a Baghdad shopkeeper falls into a deep hole, at the bottom of which sits a djinni and the corpse of a soldier from a completely different war…

From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim’s stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. Taking his cues from Kafka, his prose shines a dazzling light into the dark absurdities of Iraq’s recent past and the torments of its countless refugees. The subject of this, his second collection, is primarily trauma and the curious strategies human beings adopt to process it (including, of course, fiction). The result is a masterclass in metaphor – a new kind of story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking.

My Review: This book won The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2014.

It's not instantly obvious to me why it won such a prestigious prize, not because it's a poorly written book, but because it's much of a muchness with the many, many story collections there are in the world. I'm not sorry to have read it, but I am not sure I'll remember much about most of it. It's fine, it's evocative of time and place, it's a very economical piece of writing. But the BEST FOREIGN FICTION published in 2013?

I dunno 'bout that one for sure, but most of me says "not a damn chance."

Anyway, to the trenches:

"The Song of the Goats" is a modest story about a man whose family is completely insane, not least of all his good self.

On more than one occasion I heard how life apparently advances, moves on, sets sail or, at worst, apparently crawls slowly forward. My life, on the other hand, simply exploded like a firecracker in the hand of God, a small flare in his mighty firmament of bombardment.

I relate. 3 stars

"The Hole" is a parable. A jinni in a hole that traps people fleeing certain death. ~meh~ Read it before, nothing new to say and not much fun to read. 2 stars

"The Fifth Floor Window" brings home the stunning, insanity-inducing reality of "collateral damage" by way of cancer patients in a Baghdad hospital. Three men in a room, only one can think past the horrors of the war in the hospital courtyard.

The operation would be in a week...I didn't know if I would survive. How I longed to go back to reading! There was nowhere I longed to be more than the university campus. I was preparing for a master's on fantasy literature. I was interested in why the country's literature did not include this distinctive genre. I had this great passion for studying and writing, which they explained in my household with the story of the umbilical cord. When I was born, and at my father's request, my elder sister buried my umbilical cord in the courtyard of her primary school. My father attributed my {brother's} academic failure to the fact that my mother buried his umbilical cord in the garden of our house.

One can see where his taste for phauntaisee arose from. 4 stars

"The Iraqi Christ" is the title story, and resembles a sort of "Appointment in Samarra" narrated by the victim...Daniel the Christian saves his compatriots with his premonitions, until one day he doesn't, and for no reason I can figure out. 3.5 stars

"The Green Zone Rabbit" offers a bleak look at the street level of murder in the name of god, a subject guaranteed to exercise my outrage muscles. The narrator has a familiar personality:

The pleasure I found in reading books was disconcerting...I felt anxious about every new piece of information. I would latch onto one particular detail and start look for references and other versions of it in other writings. I remembered, for example, that for quite some time I tracked down the subject of kissing. I read and read and felt dizzy with the subject, as if I had eaten a psychotropic fruit.

Don't we all know someone a bit like that? Why is everyone staring at me? 4 stars

"A Wolf" is the maundering, drunken bar story of an immigrant man trying to make a sodden kind of sense of a world he doesn't begin to understand.

...I believe in dreams more than I believe in God. Dreams get into you and leave, then come back with new fruit, but God is just a vast desert.

Out of the mouths of drunks... 3.5 stars

"Crosswords" takes a terrible moment of violent sectarian idiocy and makes it worse with the intersection of PTSD and Spring-Heeled Jack. Chilling. 3.5 stars

"Dear Beto" purports to be the philosophical musings of a Finnish dog. I don't doubt that there is some metaphorical gubbins in here. Frankly, I couldn't care less. 2 stars, all for this line: "You can't understand beauty without peace of mind and you can't get close to the truth without fear."

"The Killers and the Compass" marks the rite of passage of a kid into manhood (of a horrifying sort) in a brutal, nihilistic culture of viciousness. Impossible to read without despairing of the future, the present, and the past. Pass the razor blades. 3 stars

"Why Don't You Write A Novel, Instead of Talking About All These Characters?" seems to want to ask the question, "what makes a good story out of the dreadful, iniquitous, dreary stuff of reality?" The answer is, "not this." 2 stars

"Sarsara's Tree" is a pretty fable about the incredible power of loss to break the consensus of lies we call reality into unfamiliar shards. Also, don't take milk-soaked flowers from strange little girls. 3.5 stars

"The Dung Beetle", or as I like to call it, "The Origins of an Iraqi Man as a Writer in a Freakin' Cold Climate That Makes His Desert-Born Brain Go Doolally." 2.5 stars

"A Thousand and One Knives" just frankly couldn't keep my interest, and it seemed to be about some guy who had some stuff happen to him and porno pics with torture figured into it somehow and then there's a baby who materializes knives...I dunno, whatever, just MAKE IT STOP!

Fortunately, this was the last story.


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Finished Redeployment....excellent collection! A strong 4 of 5 stars.

>34 richardderus: I haven't heard the word doolally in quite some time. Also, giving this book a skip.

>34 richardderus: Yikes, giving this one a pass.

I am only recently finding myself even vaguely interested in short stories; so, I am here to see if I can find some collections worthy of buying, or borrowing. I don't think The Iraqi Christ will be on my list.

Review: 13 of forty-eight

Title: MONDAY OR TUESDAY

Author: VIRGINIA WOOLF

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A collection of eight deliberately fragmentary and experimental sketches, Monday or Tuesday remains unique in being the only volume of short stories that Virginia Woolf published herself. A woman gazes at a mark on a wall and ponders the vagaries of thought and opinion; a succession of couples are caught up with nostalgia for their past as they stroll among the vibrant flowers of Kew Gardens; a heron soars high above cities and towns, lakes and mountains, while below, life continues in all its mundanity; and blue and green are given their expression in words. Monday or Tuesday is a brilliant and striking series of impressions, written in Woolf’s characteristic lyrical and startling prose.

My Review: This short book, only 54pp in my Dover Thrift Edition, is the best and the worst of La Woolf. Some pieces are incomprehensible to the merely mortal, others are simply brilliant evocations of mood, of consciousness...it's in reading this book that I came to the realization that what many people dislike about Woolf's writing can be traced back to the sense one has of Woolf staring, staring, staring, with eyes darting hither and thither, while speaking aloud what most of us simply allow to slide from one eye to the other.

I don't think stories were Miss Virginnie's métier, the way they were Miss Eudora's for example, but there is something in each experience of a story in these pages to make one glad to have met with it.

"A Haunted House," a few brief words, a simple story of a ghostly apparition and her husband re-experiencing their home after death; not much to it, not much of it, but so haunting (!) 3.5 stars

"A Society," of women you see, a society that undertakes A Study, frankly uninteresting to me as a 21st century reader, and pretty much a clunker 2.5 stars

"Monday or Tuesday" explores simultaneity with simple imagery and makes flight seem magically mundane. 3.5 stars

"An Unwritten Novel," now, this is the Woolf of Orlando and how I adore her, what a gorgeous thing it is to be there in her head as her eyes move ceaselessly and her brain which can not shut itself off like mere mortals' can, and see the details that tell more than the words alone can describe, creating a huge and varied landscape from a twitch. 4.5 stars

"The String Quartet," again, brings the Orlando touch to a musical evening, but came too soon after "An Unwritten Novel" for me to drool on it so hard 4 stars

"Blue & Green," on the other hand, makes not one whit of sense and is a mere catalog of responses to the colors. 2.5 stars

"Kew Gardens," color and light and the air, with people moving through them and leaving vapor trails of self that commingle not at all, but swirl intricately around and past each other. 3.5 stars

"The Mark on the Wall," the ultimate Woolfy story, staring staring staring while brainwaves toss up Landseer paintings, housemaids, Heaven and Hell... 4 stars


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>35 hemlokgang: I'm dipping in and out of Redeployment because I found it was causing me to fog over...very powerful stuff and I want to give it my all.

>36 AuntieClio:, >37 LauraBrook: I would entirely support that decision.

>38 maggie1944: There is such an enormous variety of work done as short stories! It's funny how the genre label takes no account of any subject, simply of the form. There isn't a "novels" category, for example, that wouldn't mean anything much to people. Is it a mystery, a romance, SF, what?

Short stories, OTOH, that's the basic fact and there it rests. Ta da. I think that's odd.

yes, I agree that is odd.

I might try the V. Woolf collection. I found it for my Nook for $.99

So, not much lost if I hate it.

>41 maggie1944: That's the old fight, Karen44! Give la Virginnie a whirl.

Review: 14 of forty-eight

Title: LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE

Author: JAY BELL

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Remember that hunky guy on YouTube who caught your eye? The one with the awesome pecs and killer smile? I bet you couldn't stop watching his videos. Just imagine if you had a chance to meet him and all your fantasies started coming true. There's only one catch: Between you and your dream guy is his less-than-pleased boyfriend. They say that love conquers all, but can love conquer love?

My Review: That was a charming 50-page freebie that I am very pleased to have read. Sweet doofus meets his high-school crush, now a hawt slab o' beef; boyfriend of hawtness is visibly unhappy about the luuuv connection; and then...nothing happens.

I like that.

Nothing happens because doofus has a sense of fair play and empathy: Would he want *his* man in the arms of another? No. So, no.

Don't get me wrong, I like the smexy tales of boys doin' the nasty on every flat surface and many vertical ones, too. But there's more to life than porn. (I can't believe I just typed that.) Once, about a squillion years ago, I fell in love with the man I went to see the movie Maurice with. We weren't either of us newbies. We watched the film, sighed in the same places, held hands (and that's all!) as we watched the men tangle their lusts and loves up, and even have an implied happy ending (in the non-massage-parlor sense). As it was 1988, the happy ending was not able to be explicit.

As we left the theater, I sighed something approving about how sweet it all was, and BJ gave me the side-eye before saying, "What do you think those guys are gonna talk about after a year?"

And that, my chick-a-biddies, is all it took for me to know I'd found the real thing. Someone who found the same plot holes in life that I found, who wasn't more interested in the wrapping paper than the gift. And I was right. When he died four years later, it was a horrible wrench, and I miss him still. But, like Evan the doofus, I knew what was going to make me happy, and waited for my happiness to catch up to where I already was.

Never, ever been sorry a minute, no matter that it ended long, long before it should have. And that's what this story put me in mind of, that realization that "this is it, this is what I waited for," and I enjoyed every minute I had of it. I expect these men will too. So yeah...a good story.

In 50 pages, you don't expect a whole lot of character development. I found the boyfriend, Orlando, a bit too hastily limned, and knocked off a star for Tony the hunk's facile presentation...a *little* depth would've been welcome...and the throwaway character of Julie, the doofus's fag hag, needed a more complete role. None of these are fatal flaws. They're points of information, and the issues raised would raise this very solid, enjoyable tale into a novella I'd be warbling from the rooftops about.

It's free on your Kindle today, 9 July 2014. Get it, read it, pass a pleasant half-hour and support a promising writer with a lot more to say.


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BTW, I did buy Virginia Wolff's Monday or Tuesday collection and am enjoying what I've read so far... Thank you for encouraging me to do that. I would not have done it without your words.

>44 maggie1944: Excellent! It's a worthwhile collection to read, even with the less-than-stellar ones.

Review: 15 of forty-eight

Title: SCAVENGER: A Sand Diver Tale

Author: TIMOTHY C. WARD

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Hugh Howey's novel, SAND, introduced us to a future America covered in sand and the terrorists who will stop at nothing to unearth the fabled city of Danvar.

Scavenger centers on the story of Divemaster Rush, a bereaved father and estranged husband who is offered a job he can't refuse. Rush can either harden his heart and survive or risk his life for what already seems lost.

Scavenger can be read without having read SAND. Written and sold with permission from Hugh Howey.

My Review: I haven't read SAND, but this novelette set in the same universe makes me want to. The idea of a future of endless, shifting desert sands has resonance for my South Texan desertification-fearin' self. (Hey, the Rio Grande is a dry ditch in a lot of places. THAT is scary as fuck, people.)

Nice story indeed, and Rush is a character I can easily imagine tent-poling a novel. The Honorable Man among the Degenerates is an evergreen for a reason. I suspect this post-apocalyptic world can support quite a lot of stories. (One of my personal tests for good world-building is to see if I can imagine other characters in the setting, and see them in gripping stories that are wholly their own.)

It's 99¢ on Kindle, and it's a pleasant way to wile away an hour. Support indie SF and take a chance on this exciting tale.


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I haven't read Sand yet but I thoroughly enjoyed the Wool trilogy. Howey is very encouraging to others to use his worlds and build off them. There's a world of "fanfic" that he endorses.

>47 AuntieClio: I consider that admirable. Start from nothin', build somethin', reach back and help the next guy up. Go Howey!

Review: 16 of forty-eight

Title: THE MIDAS PLAGUE

Author: FREDERIK POHL

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Although the three part serial beginning in the June 1952 issue in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth had established Frederik Pohl as a formidable contributor, this novelette in the April 1954 issue was his first solo contribution and marked him as an important addition to the growing roster of social satirists enlisted by Horace Gold, the editor of GALAXY magazine.

The audacious and patchwork concept underlying this story (the richer you are the less you are forced to consume; the greatest poverty is involved with the aggregation of goods) was Horace Gold’s and according to Pohl he had offered it to almost all of his regular contributors, asking for a story centered on the idea. The idea lacks all credibility, everyone (including Pohl) told him and everyone refused to write something so patently unbelievable until, according to Pohl, Horace browbeat him into an attempt and Pohl decided that it was less trouble to deliver something than continue to resist.

To his utter shock, the story was received by Gold and his readership with great glee, was among the most popular GALAXY ever published (or Pohl) and one of the most anthologized. Whether this demonstrated the audacity and scope of Gold’s unreason or whether it confirmed Gold’s genius (or both) Pohl was utterly unable to decide. The sculpted consumer-obsessed society was used again by Pohl a few years later in the novelette THE MAN WHO ATE THE WORLD which was far more credible (consumption-obsession as a kind of personal tyranny) and, perhaps for that very reason, much less successful, barely remembered.

My Review: Rather entertaining, in a simple way. But as I read on, I had this chill of terror...after all, in a world where there are "old" Kindles and iPhones and Galaxy tablets made in 2012, how far are we from the dystopia of this tale?

Thanks to LibraryThing Fred, I read this antique, sixty-year-old tale of consumerism's most appalling subtext writ large. It's hard not to see how this 12,000 or so word novelette would benefit from either more or less space. It would, in hands more skilled, have been side-splittingly funny. Pohl wasn't really up to it in 1954. But honestly, it was an hour spent smiling and frowning at the same time, as I processed the implications of the fact that people saw what was happening in the wake of consumerism in 1954...and did nothing.

That chilled me.

At $2.99 (or free for the Unlimited user), and an hour or so of time, this felt like a break-even investment. I was hoping for a positive return of laughs, and got the smiles instead. But overall I'd say it's a good way to spend an afternoon. Very worthwhile for the Unlimited folks, less so for the money-spenders.


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Wonderful review, as always. Have you read anything else by Pohl? I've been spending a little more time in the SF section at work, and he's got a fair few books out. I don't read very much in the genre, but I'm just starting to, and I can't tell if he'd be someone I'd enjoy or throw the book across the room because it's so sexist, etc.

>50 LauraBrook: Thank you, Laura! I liked Pohl well enough in my youff. His Heechee Saga (Gateway, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Heechee Rendezvous) was my then-favorite series. Older stuff like The Space Merchants and this story are very very dated.

But I don't see sexism the way women do, sorta like straight people don't see their homophobia. Often it simply passes me silently. One does one's poor best with the loudest cases....

>52 LauraBrook: Thanks, Richard. I'll check for Gateway at work tomorrow, and give him a shot. I don't always necessarily mind sexism so much, usually I can just chalk it up to being "of its time" and keep on reading. But some books are just so glaringly offensive that I can't hack it. The last one I read that made me so mad I had to stop reading was The Sheltering Sky - it was so racist that I was repulsed. Only spite and sheer stubbornness (Taurus here) made me hate-skim-read to finish it so I could officially cross it off the big list of "classics" and move on.

Sexism doesn't always bother me, but racism and homophobia sure do. Makes me white-hot furious in half a millisecond. That, and "Christian" literature. Ugh.

>52 LauraBrook: The "of its time" argument works fine for explaining, but nothing excuses the attitudes. It's just appalling to me what passed for acceptable!

>53 richardderus: You're right as always, Richard! :)

Review: 17 of forty-eight

Title: LIFE, ON THE OTHER SIDE

Author: DANIEL POWELL

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: When the bombs fell, they erased the face of the world. They expunged the mind of a civilization, and they forever changed our conceptual understanding of identity.

But there are some who still remember, and Browning is one of them. Still searching for his wife, he is drawn to the edge of the containment barrier and the Silence Virus it was built to contain.

And standing there, the questions are simple: What's left, on the far side of those great iron gates?

Is she still inside?

A quiet tale of life after the apocalypse, "Life, On the Other Side" (3800 words) was originally published in the journal Weber: The Contemporary West. It was reprinted in the collection The Silver Coast and Other Stories.

My Review: It is indeed a quiet tale, and has its charm in that quietude. The idea of the Silence Virus is chilling, and plausible; the idea of a post-nuclear release of an engineered plague is severely depressing though grimly probable.

One of short fiction's big advantages is the ability to cut to the action, making short shrift of the "show, don't tell" writing nostrum. Whip it up, the story shouts at the author, gaff 'em through the gills and land those readers' feelings fast!

Is it probable that a man, brutalized for three long years, can hold on to the idea of rescuing his wife from quarantine? I rather doubt it, but in this short a time-frame it's a moot point. Buy in or blow it off. So I bought in and went with Browning as he went over the quarantine wall. The deep misery of a world that's got no cultural structure, collapsed from mass death and brutal cruelty, becomes numbing. A story makes it possible to process the full impact of the personal devastation before shut-down sets in.

A memorable exploration of the human spirit's foundational hunger for connection. Quite a well-spent half hour.


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Review: 18 of forty-eight

Title: BY THE SILVER WATER OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN

Author: JOE HILL

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Little Gail London and her friend Joel Quarrel are out on a cold and lonely morning at the end of summer, when they make the find of the century: a dead plesiosaur, the size of a two-ton truck, washed up on the sand. With the fog swirling about them, they make their plans, fight to defend their discovery, and face for the first time the enormity of mortality itself… all unaware of what else might be out there in the silver water of Lake Champlain.

My Review: Childhood's end. Abusive and/or neglectful adults versus damaged children. A completely unexpected and seemingly impossible discovery sets each against all, and no one comes out unchanged.

Sound familiar? It should. It's an evergreen plot for a reason. It explores no new territory, mostly because it doesn't need to. This iteration of the evergreen is told in the voice and from the viewpoint of three kids trapped in a world of hungover parents. Their mutual discovery of the dinosaur, apparently dead, causes little Gail to look inside for what she wants to have in this life. What she decides has a poignance that Hill reveals but doesn't linger over. Not for nothing is Hill the son of novelists!

Thirty well-spent minutes.


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Review: 19 of forty-eight

Title: THE KENTUCKY STORIES

Author: JOE ASHBY PORTER

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In these eight stories, the state of Kentucky becomes a state of mind—a semi-mythical realm of the heart's fidelities and predelictions, of violence, fear, and love. It is a land where the commonplace takes on a new and marvelous glow as quixotic individuals explore the enduring puzzles of human existence.

Joe Ashby Porter brings a distinctive freshness to universal themes: the commerce of love and abandonment, the sometimes mysterious influence of a place on events, the relationship between pride, humility, and justice, and the rewards of allegiance and persistence. His characters—innocents all—resolutely pursue their life's goals through picaresque tales that are continually unfolding from surprise to surprise. From the urbane twins of "In the Mind's Eye" to the isolated mountain family of "A Child of the Heart," Porter's protagonists share a stubborn optimism and trust and a readiness to see things through to their conclusion.

In Porter's half-lost and half-remembered Kentucky, only fiction is true. I beckons the reader with all the promised adventure and exhilaration that drew Daniel Boone to a similarly unexplored land two centuries ago.

My Review: Clearly Porter heard and absorbed the maxim, "Begin as you mean to go on." Eight stories in the collection, and all of them are juicy. Faithful to the Bryce Method, I'll offer a small hit on each one of the stories.

"Bowling Green" offers a practical country woman's take on the nature of expectations and the role of hope in life. "She was practically a virgin—she'd only had to do with her brothers." The narrator offers this on page three. 4.75 stars

"Murder at the Sweet Varsity" is a fifty-year-old memory of a violent crime resulting from sordid criminality, told from the viewpoint of the unjustly accused. It's a taut twenty-page murder mystery, and darn good too. 4.5 stars

"A Child of the Heart" is about the sad endings that follow happy beginnings. "Only a fool will deny that an abundance of flowers can quicken a woman's blood, and that continuing sun can burn years off a man's back. The poverty of life here augments the power of those influences. We lose our vision, and move like wooden toys: one year we wash the curtains, the next we plant a row of cabbages behind the house; and then comes a summer like that one, with grass soft as rabbit fur, and flowers." Of course a price must be paid for abundance and glory. 5 stars

"The Vacation" takes us into the heart of the human condition: It is human nature to hate those whom we have injured. Tacitus said it two thousand years ago. It's never been not true. 4 stars

"Nadine, The Supermarket, The Story Ends" purports to be three interconnected shorter pieces about the end of the world...in many ways eerily prescient, as with Ebola and numerous limited wars spreading and metastasizing, and in others a product of the 1970s/80s in which it was written...but in the end not coming together as a satisfying whole, and not strong enough in its parts to reach the heights surrounding it. 3 stars

"In the Mind's Eye" completely wigged me out...twins raised by a very loosely wrapped widow, sharing one name and one identity, not learning any sense of time because they were each Victor for only one day, then switch, then switch, then...you know, it makes my head hurt to think about it. Sort of a less horrible, less plausible version of Room. I don't know if I've absorbed its real and total implications, or ever can expect to. 4 stars

"Bright Glances" recounts the simple events of a calm life spent unhurriedly. Vale, Margaret Rideout Utley Kercheval Smoot. I will remember you. Thanks for wishing me well. 4 stars

"Yours" is a charming valedictory to a quiet journey, and to a little loved companion, and to a time and a place that aren't conceivable in the Internet age. Seek this collection of small gems out and bask in its lovely words, its truthsome stories, and its vanished people.4 stars


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Review: 20 of forty-eight

Title: SEPTEMBER AT WALL AND BROAD

Author: KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: September 1920, New York City: Phillipa D’Arco makes a living investigating the past for the United States Government. Bloodless, they call her, making her one of the best operatives. So, when Phillipa fails to return back to 2057 to report her findings, Assistant Attorney General Preston Lane needs to make a decision: send in yet another investigator or lose a valuable asset.

Whatever Lane decides, he knows he’ll face consequences. But the truth behind Phillipa’s disappearance will cause ripples in time Lane can’t begin to imagine.

This story is available free at Kristine Rusch's website until 21 September 2014.

My Review: A time-travel short story that gave me enough to get a taste for more. I like the Federal Department of Time, our gummint's controlling agency for criminal activity in the time line; and I was very interested in the competing parties' identities. Being a short story, there was not a lot of room to make fully realized characters. I was left wanting more of Philippa's take on her In Time (analogous to In Country) job's realities, the stinks and the sexism and the like, because what I did get made me think she's a pistol. Turning someone high-powered loose on the past makes for some fun moments.

And there's a clever little trap door set into the piece that allows for, demand being there, more stories with Philippa in them. I'm casting my vote "yes" because there is a sense, after reading this short work, that there's a lot going on in this storyverse and inside the head and heart of a "bloodless" woman.


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Consider me hit by two BBs, Richard! Excellent reviews, as always! *smooch*

>59 LauraBrook: Ooo! So glad to spread the short-story word!

I'm starting PRAYING DRUNK and hoping for great things.

Review: 21 of forty-eight

Title: WIRELESS

Author: CHARLES STROSS

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Science fiction guru Charles Stross "sizzles with ideas" (Denver Post) in his first major short story collection.

The Hugo Award-winning author of such groundbreaking and innovative novels as Accelerando, Halting State, and Saturn's Children delivers a rich selection of speculative fiction- including a novella original to this volume- brought together for the first time in one collection, showcasing the limitless imagination of one of the twenty-first century's most daring visionaries.

My Review: As always, I'll rate the stories individually:
--"Missile Gap": 3*; ~meh~
--"Rogue Farm": 4.25*; I regained hope for the remainder of the collection about here
--"A Colder War": 2.5*; who the hell is this story about? It's littered with characters and I don't get to know any of 'em
--"Maxos": ?; I can't even rate this because it's just not a story, it's an article and it clangs like a cast-iron pot lid on a cheatin' husband's head
--"Down on the Farm": 5*; subject, characters, and voice all came together perfectly
--"Unwirer": 3.5*; alternative history in short form always frustrates a little bit, but this one overcame the inevitable and left me wanting more
--"Trunk and Disorderly": 2*; humor? Not for me
--"Snowball's Chance": 2.5*; anyone who doesn't "get it" instantly probably has one digit in their age, and absent any sense of suspense, so what?
--"Palimpsest": 5*; glitters with the glamour of everything being in precisely the right place