Pharoni by Colin Dodds

When the body of Harry Injurides - playwright, provocateur and bodybuilder - washes up on a beach, his friends are shocked, but not altogether surprised. But when they meet to mourn Harry, he shows up and says he's been resurrected.

Pharoni is the story of those friends. Tommy Pharoni tries to overcome his shock by writing about his friend's resurrection, and accidentally starts a religion. Roy Sudden starts a tech empire based on digital empathy and digital pain, drawing in billionaire investors, femme-fatale programmers, and tsunamis of capital. And, Roy's on-again, off-again girlfriend Maud works in secret to bring radical justice to the most neglected and abused corners of society.

As Tommy's religion grows, Roy and his backers try to take control of it. The battle, about more than doctrine, engulfs Tommy's marriage and threatens his life, leading to a conflict with strangely humane results that no one could predict.

Told in the first person, Pharoni has the feel of a memoir or a really long confession. Tommy Pharoni is a struggling screenplay writer who pays his bills and alimony by working a soulless marketing job. His closest friends were aspiring artists of different sorts in college. Now in their mid-thirties, they've set aside those aspirations to "adult" properly. All except for Harry, whose death opens the story. Harry struggled to fit into contemporary society, instead preferring to help the homeless while penning "words of wisdom" in his many notebooks. After his death and subsequent re-birth, those notebooks wound up in Tommy's possession. Ultimately, Tommy would collect them into a coherent manuscript and seek out a way to get them published.

As Tommy is a screenwriter, the format of the story periodically shifts into screenplay mode. This works particularly well for conversations as it affords opportunity to get to know the other characters through their dialogue rather than relying on Tommy's narrative. I wouldn't say Tommy is an unreliable narrator, but he does limit what we can learn about what's going on elsewhere with other characters. References to things that have been written elsewhere and NDAs force the reader to fill in the gaps.

After Harry's resurrection, the lives of Tommy and his friends change as described in the blurb, but there's so much more. The group of friends find themselves splattered by the seven deadly sins, fitting for a story where a religion is founded upon the philosophical musings of a character that has died and miraculously resurrected days later. At least Christianity didn't get partnered with a health and wellness brand. The corrupting influence of millions and billions of dollars seeps its way into their lives and rots them from within. What is friendship worth? Can you put a dollar amount on it?

If there's one overarching theme that I can take away from this tale, it's that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Keeping this spoiler free, I'll say that Tommy started out as a character that I could connect with to someone I didn't want anything to do with. But I stuck with him because act two opens with:

This is where I get unrelatable, maybe even unlikable. As the writer of failed screenplays, I know what a mortal sin unlikability can be.

That gave me hope for him in act three. But Tommy is far from the only person to be corrupted by power. It's everyone up to the very end of the story. And the only characters whose souls are left intact are those who never possess it.

Colin Dodds has crafted an excellent morality play with vivid characters. Pharoni offers modern day parallels to the founding of Christianity, right down to the Christmas star, but in an age of unbridled capitalism. If you're old enough, with all of the life experience that implies, it forces you to take a look at this fellowship of friends and how they sacrificed art and friendship for wealth and power and check to make sure that this isn't a mirror of your own life.

4 stars

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DED

Boys by Scott Semegran

These are the stories of three boys living in Texas: one growing up, one dreaming, and one fighting to stay alive in the face of destitution and adversity. There's second-grader William, a shy yet imaginative boy who schemes about how to get back at his school-yard bully, Randy. Then there's Sam, a 15-year-old boy who dreams of getting a 1980 Mazda RX-7 for his sixteenth birthday but has to work at a Greek restaurant to fund his dream. Finally, there's Seff, a 21-year-old on the brink of manhood, trying to survive along with his roommate, working as waiters and barely making ends meet. These three stories are told with heart, humor, and an uncompromising look at what it meant to grow up in Texas during the 1980s and 1990s.

The collection opens with Wiliam's story, "The Great and Powerful, Brave Raideen". It's a short story with a predictable plot element, but it's nicely done. The characters are honestly portrayed; the dialogue genuine. It demonstrates the dual fickle-forgiving nature of children and the power of play.

Sam's story, "Good Night, Jerk Face", comes next. It's a novelette that ends rather abruptly. Semegran builds up the tension between Sam and his parents over Sam's desire to buy the car of his dreams, but it just fizzles out. There's also the potential for conflict between Sam and his boss over the restaurant's delivery van, but that too gets shrugged off. The title of this story implies some kind of confrontation. While Semegran explains who says it, we never find out why. To his credit, Semegran does a good job at capturing adolescent anxiety—learning how to drive, talking to girls, working menial jobs.

The remainder and bulk of the book is "The Discarded Feast". Seff and his roommate, Alfonso, work at a chain restaurant barely getting by on their meager earnings. The story covers their adventures at work and outside of it. A good deal of their free time is spent smoking cigarettes, drinking cheap beer, and wondering if they'll be able to come up with the money for next month's rent. If it were a movie, it could serve in a double feature with Waiting, but the characters are far more realistic.

This isn't so much a story you get wrapped up in for plot; the events pertaining to the story's title make up a fraction of the content. Rather, you tune in for the characters. Everyone has a story, and the people that Seff meets tell him their stories. Some are more interesting than others. I get the feeling that these are people that Semegran met when he was Seff's age, and he felt compelled to honor them by relating their stories here.

Boys is a collection of stories that reads more like a fictionalized memoir. It would've benefited from a run through by an editor to draw a bit more focus in content and to clean up the grammatical mistakes (mostly comma usage). Semegran gets points for realistic characters even if the book falls short on the storytelling.

Scott Semegran is also the author of The Meteoric Rise of Simon Burchwood and The Spectacular Simon Burchwood. For more information about these works, check out the author's website.

The Girl in the Photo by Wally Wood

Surgeon Robert Emmerling’s death at age 86 in The Girl in the Photo’s opening chapter serves as a catalyst for a series of discoveries by his two children. While clearing out their father’s home, David and Abbie find a memoir he had written about being stationed in Japan during the Korean War, years before he met their mother. It describes his involvement with Masami, a woman he met there. David and Abbie also turn up Masami’s photograph and a letter she had written to Dr. Emmerling after he returned to the U.S. This previously unknown episode in their father’s life raises questions for the siblings: Why did the romance end, and what happened to Masami afterward?

The novel draws the reader into this family’s story through plot elements that span past and present-day action. In the present, Abbie and David deal with their grief, pursue the truth about Masami and try to resolve dilemmas in their personal lives. But the past mingles freely in the form of frequent flashbacks to the siblings’ childhood and the memoir, whose chapters are interspersed with the main text of the novel.

During the events described in his memoir, Dr. Emmerling exhibits some of the same qualities he did while raising David and Abbie. Central to his character is the tendency to pass judgment on others. His memoir recounts Dr. Emmerling’s efforts to discourage a fellow military doctor from marrying his Japanese girlfriend. He enumerated various reasons for his objections to their marriage, such as cultural differences and the prejudice that a Japanese wife and children would be subjected to in the U.S. during the 1950s. He concluded, “Face it – marrying a Japanese woman is taking someone from a third-world country and expecting her to make it in a first-world country.”

David and Abbie’s recollections also depict a judgmental, controlling man who made his children feel inadequate. David recalls the confrontation in which he told his father that he didn’t have what it took to continue with his pre-med studies.

Dad wouldn’t let that pass. “Of course you’re good enough. You’re smart enough. You’re not trying hard enough. You’ve got to try harder.”

David looked to his mother at the other end of the dining room table for understanding and support. “I am trying! I’ve been trying all year. I just can’t do it.”

“You’re not stupid, David,” said Dad. “I refuse to believe you can’t pass second semester chemistry.”

Abbie too has memories of unsavory aspects of her father’s personality. She had been selected to perform in a school musical, but his reaction shocked Abbie, who remembers,

He said, “I understand you want to sing a duet in public with that colored student.” I didn’t know what to say. He never paid any attention to what I was doing in school. “You may not,” he announced. “I absolutely forbid it.” … I was crushed. I couldn’t believe my own father was so prejudiced. I probably said something like, ‘”Why?” He wouldn’t look at me. “I’m your father,” he said. “As long as you live in my house, you’ll do what you’re told. The subject is closed.”

On the other hand, the memoir illuminates aspects of their distant, unemotional father’s character that David and Abbie never knew existed. It reveals him to be capable of tenderness, rage and confusion – things they did not witness while growing up. Describing how he feels when he’s with Masami, Dr. Emmerling writes in his memoir,

At these moments, I feel as if I’ve briefly come truly alive. This is the only reality I crave. Not the hospital. Not the operating room. Certainly not the war and the endless train of wounded GIs. Not whatever is to come after this time – the States, a hospital affiliation, a career, a wife, children, a home, two cars, country club membership. None of that could ever be as real as this.

Further muddying the waters are flashbacks in which Dr. Emmerling unexpectedly behaved with great kindness toward those in trouble. As a result, he initially appears to the reader as a man rife with inexplicable inconsistencies. But through the shifts between present and past, the author gradually assembles the various pieces of the puzzle that is Dr. Emmerling’s life. Behavior that seemed incomprehensible earlier in the book makes sense in the context of subsequent revelations. Along with David and Abbie, the reader comes to an understanding of a complex man whose character was indelibly marked by the profound experience he had in Japan.

This novel’s greatest strength is its characterizations. Dr.Emmerling emerges as a flawed, often unlikable but fully realized human being. The reader can easily imagine how he might react in any situation. The characters of Abbie and David are also painstakingly constructed. The reader learns about their relationships, their careers, their triumphs and their disappointments. Their father’s influence reverberates in their lives, and the reader can trace his impact on their choices.

The memoir’s descriptions of Korean-War-era Japan and its denizens are richly detailed and effectively transport the reader to another time and place. In some sections of the book, however, the level of detail about Japanese culture is somewhat excessive, and readers may find their interest flagging through these passages.

Overall, The Girl in the Photo is an absorbing tale whose characters remain vivid in the reader’s memory long after the closing chapter.

This book is available from Amazon.

Remember Big by Kelly Wittmann

Remember Big follows the bumpy journey of Charlie Matthias as he tries to rebuild his life after bottoming out in his early 30s. When the story begins, he’s living in his wealthy parents’ suburban Chicago home after addiction wrecked his marriage and professional golf career. He’s surrounded by dysfunction – a bullying father, a manipulative mother and an assortment of insensitive acquaintances – all of them passing judgment on Charlie’s squandering of his potential. Despite his loathing for the shallow country club enclave into which he’s retreated, Charlie is hobbled by inertia. He has no motivation to find a new career or do anything other than pine for his ex-wife. His family’s relentless criticism finally goads him into making a new start, and he moves to the city. His apartment building’s owners are the parents of a woman he’d known as a teenager. The daughter, Erica Denner, also lives in the building, and Charlie is immediately attracted to her, even though she is the antithesis of what Charlie has been taught to appreciate in women. Unlike the meticulously groomed trophy wives who populate the spas and shopping malls of Charlie’s hometown, Erica leads a more authentic life – helping her parents manage the building, working in a feminist bookstore, pursuing artistic endeavors and treating everyone with kindness.

The main plotline is the relationship between Charlie and Erica. Conditioned to worship material success and go to any lengths in its pursuit, can Charlie find happiness with a woman whose modest lifestyle centers on the intangibles that no amount of money can buy? Interwoven with the romance are various subplots including friction with Charlie’s parents, who disapprove of his relationship with Erica; his sisters’ struggles with anorexia; and a run-in with a cop who carries a grudge about something that happened when he and Charlie were schoolmates.

Remember Big incorporates many conventions of contemporary romantic comedy – the spunky, insightful elderly mentor (Charlie’s grandmother); the juxtaposition of old-world traditions with modern American life (Erica’s parents are East German immigrants); the inevitable big night out scene in which the female lead transforms herself into the spike-heeled, cleavage-spilling vixen of every man’s fantasy. The novel avoids descending into cliché thanks to the engaging voice of its antihero narrator. Charlie makes humorous, piercing observations of himself, those around him and the banality of American suburbia. Describing his parents’ aversion to visiting Chicago, he says, “It was dirty and loud and there were unpleasant poor people there. Rich and Faye didn’t miss the sophistication, or if they did, it apparently wasn’t worth the trouble of finding a parking spot.  They needed to be – always – in places where it was possible to just glide to the next destination, rolling slowly to a stop at the end of a path as smooth and crisp as a brand new polo shirt.” At times Charlie can be exasperating. He fails to exercise self-control at critical moments and lapses into self-destructive behavior when beset by troubles. But he is also compassionate and endearingly vulnerable. Explaining his reluctance to visit the bookstore where Erica works, Charlie notes, “Lesbians and their unknowable, half-removed society made me feel like what I feared I really was, a shallow ill-educated philistine from the suburbs who was in over his head, trying to be cool for his new girlfriend while everyone laughed behind his back. A guy who couldn’t be hip if his life depended on it.”

In spite of the narrator’s penchant for introspection, the novel doesn’t get bogged down in navel-gazing. Charlie pauses the narrative when he needs to in order to explain his thinking or relate a snippet of relevant backstory, but these pauses are nearly always justified and, with one or two exceptions, never become unwelcome digressions. As a result, the plot moves briskly enough to hold the reader’s interest from start to finish. My one quibble with the pacing is the abruptness of the events leading to the resolution of Charlie’s vacillation between his residual feelings for his ex-wife and his new relationship with Erica.  It seemed to me that near the end the novel suddenly shifted from third gear to fifth, and then a couple of chapters later, it was over.

Remember Big has a robust cast of secondary characters – some lovable, some annoying, some entertainingly quirky, and nearly all somehow dysfunctional. As each one is introduced, the author provides ample characterization through words and actions, so the reader immediately understands what type of person this is. Because each new character immediately makes a strong impression, the reader never has trouble identifying characters when they reappear later. On the other hand, I was looking for more insight into the motivations of two main characters – Charlie’s parents. Their behavior toward Charlie inexplicably seems aimed at destroying his self-esteem. For example, at one point his father, trying to convince Charlie to break up with Erica, says, “So you’re happy? You’ve been happy since you started – having relations with this Denner girl? Because if you are, you should win an Academy Award. Do they have a Best Lead Moper category? Oh, wait – you’re never in the lead, are you?” Nothing that Charlie relates about his parents adequately explains such cruelty.

For a novel whose characters have so many issues, Remember Big is a lively read. I enjoyed the references to Gen X pop culture and the skewering of upper-middle-class pretension (on being told that his pregnant sister is considering the baby names Camden and Mason, Charlie involuntarily spews out the cookie he had been eating). In addition to being entertaining, the book raises deeper questions about social expectations and what it means to be happy and successful. For this reason, I think it would be an appropriate selection for book groups, since it has enough substance to provide adequate fodder for discussion.

Remember Big is available from Amazon for the Kindle and in print.

The Scottish Movie by Paul Collis

Legend has it that Shakespeare's play, Macbeth, is cursed. As such, the superstitious who work on the play will refer (and insist others do the same) to it as "The Scottish Play." Many have speculated as to the reason, but Harry Greenville writes a novel with his own explanation: the Bard stole the idea from someone else. Shakespeare's victim then sets out to exact revenge through sabotage.

Greenville, an aspiring actor living in L.A., makes the mistake of uploading it to a website where it is pilfered. When Greenville learns that his story is being made into a movie, he sets out to exact revenge of his own.

There's such a superb attention to detail here that I would swear that Collis worked on a movie set at one point in his life or he performed a mind meld with someone who did. Collis introduces us to the boredom of limo drivers, the humiliating subservience of runners, the brown nosing of the wannabes, and the egos of Hollywood's lords. But at no point does Collis resort to stereotypes. All of his characters, no matter if they're major or minor, felt real. And Greenville is a likable protagonist. While he's out for revenge, at no point does he turn dark. His antics are more of the prankster variety.

I do have two complaints though. Collis uses single quotes throughout the book for dialogue. When nested quotes arise, as in when there's speech within speech, Collis sticks with the single quotes so it becomes a bit confusing as to when the speaker stops. I realize that single quotes are preferred in the U.K., but then double quotes are required for quotes within quotes, no? There are also some POV shifts without any sort of transition so I got momentarily confused as to whose thoughts we were hearing.

I must admit that my favorite part of the book was the beginning when we're reading Greenville's story about how Shakespeare stole the idea for Macbeth. This section is a fantastic piece of historical fiction and showcases Collis's talent. I hope he considers writing something in this vein in the future.

For more information about The Scottish Movie, check out the author's website.

This Jealous Earth by Scott Dominic Carpenter

This Jealous Earth by Scott Dominic Carpenter. Midwestern Gothic Press.

It is interesting that one of these sharply written short stories, “The Spirit of the Dog,” takes place in a uranium mine. Instead of looking for sparkly bits of gold, the miners run around with Geiger counters after a preliminary blast, looking for little bursts of radiation. Most of these stories involve connections: their breaking, their forming, their resilience, their failure. Just as the forces binding particles in the atomic nucleus are enormously strong, many of the characters in these pieces are drawn, despite themselves, to their imperfect families, to their treasured pets. The opposite occurs in “The Spirit of the Dog”; the various miners pit themselves against the new, pretty engineer. Their individual stubborn egos form a sort of misogynist hive mind whose evil ideas drive everyone apart.

The egos of squabbling or drunk parents get in the way, but their kids band together for mischief or otherwise store up memories that refuse to die, and, when probed, yield little bursts of love. In “Inheritance,” a computer programmer is reminded of the illogical kindnesses of his alcoholic father as he cleans out the latter's home after his death, and has to confront some of his darker ideas of the family romance as he sees himself through the eyes of his son. In “The Death Button,” a young college student sells his plasma to make rent; he is caught up in the drudgery of survival until, as the subject of a psychology experiment, he is compelled to note each instance he thinks of death. His inadvertent running over of a squirrel starts him obsessing about death, spurring him to behave more decisively towards someone he loves.

The title story concerns a family in the last throes of preparation for the rapture. The son doesn't buy into it. As his parents scurry around doing useless things like housecleaning and clothes packing, he thinks about practical, Earthly concerns like money and food. Slowly, the rest of the family, starting with his sister, realize the strength of their own connections. What girl would choose the uncertain amusements of Heaven when she has a brother who calls her “Kitty Cat,” and who tries to arrange future care for her hamster?

The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu

Meet Vimbai. She is a young single mother working as a hairdresser. That's a book right there. Add to it that The Hairdresser of Harare takes place in Zimbabwe, a culture turned upside-down and anarchic. Inflation is so bad, cash is a nuisance; it takes a brick of notes to buy a loaf of bread. Sugar is available through shady black marketers. Armed gangs roam the streets with impunity. People who don't like the government lie low. Caucasians are fair game. Most people find solace in religion. The culture's attitudes towards gay people is pretty much pre-Stonewall. Vimbai is one of the star hairdressers in Mrs. Khumalo's shop, and inherited a house from a relative (which leaves her on bad terms with much of her family), so for the moment she is not destitute. She is able to feed herself and her daughter, Chiwoniso, and can send the child to school. Then Dumi, hairdresser extraordinaire, walks in. He outshines even Vimbai in hairdressing skills, and is soon catering to government ministers and their spouses. He befriends Vimbai, who soon falls in love with him. His family dotes on her. But what does it mean when someone says at a family dinner that Vimbai has “cured” Dumi? Why does he disappear some nights? The answer is obvious to an American reader, but not to someone in a culture made so different by the swing from colony to dictatorship that its situations could pass for science fiction.

The beauty shop thrives and expands. Vimbai allows herself a little happiness. The denouement is as expected; she is mutely uncomprehending, and behaves as any spurned woman might, but also with a tinge of resignation that is heartbreaking. She is not bereft of empathy, and like the poorest of the poor in her country, is still able to show generosity of spirit in the end. The prose is great. The metaphors provided by Zimbabwe are there to be plucked, and Huchu is a deft harvester.

The Cloven by R. Muir

As it is October, I decided to find something dark in the slush pile. The Cloven fits the bill.

It is 1987. Malcolm Poole, an unpublished writer (self-publishing in this time means going down to Kinko's), answers a personal ad (as there is no World Wide Web, there are no online dating sites) from someone seeking a writer and asks that he describe his "heart's ideal." The 666 P.O. Box is a dead giveaway to the reader but not Poole. I'm not giving anything away by telling you that the Devil itself (for Muir's Satan is a hermaphrodite) has set this trap. But unlike most, if not all, sold-your-soul-to-the-Devil stories, Satan is in the foreground of the story instead of being relegated to a walk on role. You see, Satan has its reasons for picking Poole.

Poole is in the midst of writing what he feels will be the novel that finally lands him a publishing contract. A good deal of The Cloven is this manuscript: a story about a UC Berkeley professor named Mortimer who teaches an ethics class. The use of torture factors pretty heavily in his lectures. Willis Rutherford, a grad student auditing his class, is distraught as his girlfriend, Tamara, is missing. Willis has a vague empathic ability which proves to be both blessing and curse. While he suspects Mortimer knows something about Tamara's disappearance, he isn't certain that he isn't the one who's to blame.

Beaten down with repeated failure to get any sort of attention from the publishing industry, Poole's confidence is a mask which Muir tears away to reveal a troubled and yet possibly disturbed man. The reader doesn't know whether to pity or revile him. To further complicate things, Muir calls into question how much of Poole is in Professor Mortimer. Poole reflects on his unhappy childhood and gender confusion while Mortimer does the same. While the two characters' circumstances are different, there are enough similarities that Muir keeps you guessing until the very end.

Muir's Satan is no misunderstood dark prince. It is an angry Beast with nothing but anger for God and contempt for the human race. Muir provides visceral details whenever it is in the room with Poole. Its rant against God is well thought out and demonstrates a clear unblinking arrogance of ego.

At times, Muir resorts to unconventional writing styles: poetry, paragraph long sentences and screenplay-like setting of scenes. While these might be dismissed as errors by an inexperienced writer, it isn't the case here. Muir deliberately experiments with writing conventions as someone who still sees literature as an art form and not mere entertainment. At times, I found the paragraph long sentences tiring, but Muir's heart is in the right place and should be given credit for being brave enough to wander outside the norm.

The Cloven defies the "sell your soul" mold and provides an unconventional and unflinching look at the darkness within humanity. Strong characterization drives this unsettling psychological analysis of its protagonist. Muir doesn't shy away from the graphic, whether it be sex, torture or death though it isn't done for shock value. Instead, how characters respond to it determines how readers will respond to them.

"Editorial" by Arthur Graham and "Lief" by Ryan Tressel

I have just finished reading Arthur Graham's Editorial and Ryan Tressel's Lief. They offer an interesting contrast in authorial voices. On the surface, the books are remarkably similar. Each follows a main character over a disjointed timespan: in Editorial we follow mostly one character over thousands of years (he is apparently immune to the nuclear catastrophes that kill off most of the world's population, and in one guise clutches a black leatherette notebook that serves as the tale's Maguffin) and in the other book, we follow the title character, Lief, at four-year intervals (she is a Leap Year baby) that go back and forth through her life.

Although Editorial switches between the first and third person (and between human and snake species as it indulges in a little shape-shifting), this reader was at a loss to identify any emotional investment in the characters by the author. If someone spends time as either a human or a snake, I want to know more about what it is like to, pardon the expression, experience humanity through snake eyes, and vice versa. I want to know what the kid being raised by an “aunt” and “uncle” really ate for his meals, why he exulted in their frequent fights, how he learned to read and write when being raised on dirty magazines (almost as an afterthought, deep into the story, we learn that he also attended school). The protagonist talks about using sex for currency in the world economy (I imagine it would make it very complicated to go to a movie) and generally displays a misanthropic Weltanschauung (“And this was what the people of the world, if they learned anything in their short, ignorant lives, learned on that day.” … “An ugly man and woman and their doubly ugly children [what happens when ugly multiplies] sat continuously yammering … ”) that, in itself, could still make for interesting reading if it weren't for the overall impression that Graham doesn't underpin the complicated narrative with much in the way of character development. There are scattered illustrations (one of which my Kindle couldn't handle), but they don't really add much.

Lief is a woman whom we glimpse every four yeas on February 29, from age four to forty, but out of order. We are invited to read the chapters in any order, but this reader chose to read them in the order written, which is still non-chronological. One is given a vague sense that she, too travels in time in an unusual manner. She is a rather ordinary person, a bashful child and a slightly anxious adult who goes to college and tries to sort out her complicated familial and social relationships. But the level of emotional investment by Tressel in his characters is what transforms the story. Leif is shy. Her mother is a left-wing radical who occasionally ignores the children when she is caught up in her political campaigns. The father is quite affable, and gives everyone nicknames (he reminded me, for some reason, of the father in the movie Juno). The mother dies offstage, as it were, and when we notice the name of the brother changes and he is not an older brother but a younger one we fear that he, too (the older brother), may be dead, and are relieved when we learn he was estranged from Lief and later takes steps to get back together. These are the things that draw the reader into a story, any story. Lief often refuses to wear her glasses; she has an occasional problem with excess saliva that leads to apologies and self-deprecatory remarks. If she existed as a snake for part of the narrative she would be self-conscious over a patch of dull scales and would worry about where she was going to lay her eggs. She is always cold, because it is always February 29.

Both books need editing. Both use the term “alright,” which to me is like fingernails on a blackboard. One is not squeezed in a vice but squeezed in a vise. On the plus side, I learned a new spelling for “jissom.”

March 2011 Smashwords Conveyor Belt

I picked out these pieces in the first week of March and only now am able to review them, not only due to being involved in a move but also due to the sweetness of some of the candies coming down the belt. I think the caliber of Smashwords submissions is improving.

Here Today by Simon Groth is a novel about a woman doing a short-term gig as an occupational therapist in a palliative ward. It takes place in Australia. The protagonist, Astrid, is bunking with a friend, Leith, who herself has become paralyzed from the waist down, and who deals with it by dressing and behaving like Lindsay Lohan. Astrid has self-esteem issues, but does some good work with the mostly elderly clientele, and with a famous writer who has suddenly become locked in by a stroke. The theme of the book is communication; sometimes this is expressed with slightly heavy-handed metaphors, as when Astrid bites her tongue seriously enough to require medical attention, but overall the interplay between her, her patients, and her friend is handled very well. The narrative explores the lies we tell to ourselves and to others, and the struggle to communicate truthfully that some never win. It was an enjoyable book overall.

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The Empress Rose by Chris Eastvedt held my attention for many pages, until the constant info-dump of material about the superiority of hydroponic farming wore me down. At my new digs, a front and back yard with scruffy grass are challenging me to revitalize them organically, but I doubt you want to hear much about the three-bin method of composting or the pros and cons of corn gluten meal. But Rose doesn't stop. At a farmers' market, after she has explained to other farmers in excruciating detail how her methods are superior, she starts all over again preaching to a restaurateur. I have been accused of doing the same thing over topics I am passionate about; I have learned that it is a quick way to bore people conversationally, and it sure is a good way to bore the reader if one is not careful.

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Siding the House by Michael Jasper is a short vignette about a poor African-American family living down South who try to preserve a little joie de vivre in the face of threatening monotony and casual racism. The story is narrated by turns by Kanita, the little daughter, all brightness and speed; her depressed mother; her toothless grandmother, who tries to keep up morale by constantly making candy (an imaginative example of self-defeating behavior); and Bobby Ray, the developmentally delayed brother. Their house is being covered with siding by two young white men who seem to illustrate the downside of attempts at upward mobility in a racist system. Kanita disowns the siding, calling it “ugly,” and manages to hold onto her self-esteem. Beautifully written.

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Tim the Tale Teller by Timothy Conerson: "By 2010 President Obama was constantly looking for terrorist in every corner of the globe. While cities and towns in the United States crumbled, Chinese computer programmers began to create a virus that paralyzed the weapon systems in the U.S. All combat took place hand to hand, gun to gun. The people of the United States were not particularly patriotic during that time so it was easy for the Chinese military to occupy the U.S."

This is from “The Peoples [sic] Republic,” the first of several short stories. I think he means “terrorists.” This would have worked so much better if set in the distant future, with names changed (and text edited; there are many typos and grammatical errors). The year 2010 has come and gone, and I see no dearth of people who consider themselves patriotic, from the Tea Partiers to the strikers in Wisconsin. The author really liked his own book; he gave it five stars on Amazon.

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Chewing on Pen Caps by Cloud Buchholz. I think this is. A type of experimental fiction. Because when the narrative is. In the POV of. Or about the protagonist. Lemon Anderson. The structure reverts. To sentence fragments. But it's difficult to read. And no substitute for character development. Which may happen eventually. But not soon enough for me.

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If you find explicit sexual content unpleasant, read no further.

This is Butte. You Have Ten Minutes by Craig Lancaster and Gunshot Stigmata by Scott C. Rogers, if I had them in paperback, would probably smell of stale cigarette smoke and dried beer, with covers splotched with dried secretions whose origin I might not want to know. The Lancaster book looks at the trajectories of the lives of several people in Montana, down on their luck, and in one case, in prison. There is a lot of riding of Greyhound buses, furtive and fast screwing in a bus station restroom, and the exchange of a blow job for a lift with a trucker. The prose is intense but smooth, like good black coffee. The characters are honed by experience, mostly bad. Any residual loyalty or vulnerability is tested or betrayed. The whole narrative is bathed in yellowish sodium streetlight.

Rogers' book is different, in that its unreliable narrator is usually stoned and always insane. A damaged product of the foster care system, he plays guitar until his incapacity to bear life leads him to shoot himself in the hand, hence the title. He does try to find love; an uninhibited male view of sex runs rampant here and is refreshing. Rogers writes about sex and the ever-present undertone of aggression, like Charles Bukowski on steroids: “The mole that hid just on the inside of her right thigh. Whenever I ate her out I always kissed it goodbye afterwards, pulling up with a chin wet like a lion fresh from a kill.” The novella is in many short, disjointed chapters that jump around like the disordered thoughts of a severely shattered soul. Very well done.

The Smashwords Conveyor Belt

It has been a while since I have sampled the treasures of Smashwords as they arrive hot off the server. Once again, I am looking at the book-length literary fiction offerings available today, September 15. I mainly read the samples, which are often generous, but if I really love a book, I buy it. I am skipping thrillers and any other genres I feel would be better judged by another member of the staff.

First up is G. K. Ingersoll's The Atheist Vignettes. This is a mostly well-written pastiche of pieces about people, mostly former members of a group called Chris†eens, who are confronting their doubts about faith as they enter middle age. We are treated to sections of a play interspersed with vignettes (naturally) of characters in various states of dogmatic compliance/anxiety interacting with one another. The dialog seems very sharp and realistic; the only problem is with the play excerpt at the beginning, featuring a dialog between God and Satan. The name of the speaker does not begin every line, so the reader is constantly referring back to the top of the page and counting downward “God, Satan, God, Satan...” to the line in question. There are also a few syntactical errors, but overall it looks like an interesting read.

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Next, we have three offerings from the mysterious “Dorian Taylor.” Is he real? Is he alive? Is he dead? The preface of each work only hints.

I will start with Modern Problems. We are told of an author using the pseudonym “Dorian Taylor,” an artist plagued by anomie who just cannot get it together to find a market for his writing. The book is a pastiche of narratives, beginning with a poem. I think Taylor has a story to tell, but first he has to fix the errors and the derivative style. I'm sure he can come up with a more interesting description of a dancer than comparing her to Terpsichore:

“From all that he could conger up in his mind in later years, all that really presented itself to his memory were Jamie's legs…”

“Standing still she was a homely little girl from Nebraska, in motion she was Terpsichore, the Goddess of the dance, and she came from Mount Olympus.

“There is or maybe was, a bar off of Washington Square, situated in the basement. It had chess boards painted on it's tables, and the chief reason for going there was to discuss philosophy, or literature, or maybe play a game of chess, while sipping the French liquid fire called Pernod” (italics mine)…

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Top 40 is a book that uses old (and I mean OLD) pop tunes as chapter headings in stories about the author as a “man out of time.” Being old myself, I can relate. I didn't get through enough of the sample to see if he actually used Joni Mitchell's “Urge for Going,” but it's what comes to mind. The image of the rambling man who “marches to a different drummer” or “hears the call of the road,” or (if I ever write my own song) “is too narcissistic to commit to anyone” is very prominent. I'm hoping it was a satirical treatment, but when he misspelled “Iliad” I couldn't go on.

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Billed as “Georgette Heyer meets the Marquis De Sade,” Taylor's Volatile Elements makes for more interesting reading. It is about a very wealthy man who owns vineyards and other revenue-producing ventures, a man who came by his money in a very unfortunate way that I wish Taylor had elaborated much more upon. He meets up with a long-lost girlfriend, and we are treated to multiple points of view, as well as lots of steamy sex. I think Taylor's characters become much more interesting when they are making love rather than soliloquizing. This seems to be the most mature of the works.

UPDATE: We think this has been republished as The Gaze of the Abyss.

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Elder Wonder Comes of Age is a book about horny Mormons. It's very funny. It's Mormon practice to send their young eighteen-year-old men to do two years of missionary work. They can have only limited contact with family and friends while on a mission. The protagonist, Jerry Wonder, already has one strike against him: he's a vegetarian. Also, as most eighteen-year-old humans, he's constantly thinking about sex. He is sent to New Zealand, where, under the very watchful eye of a senior elder, he goes out proselytizing with other horny teens. It is the early 1960's, and everybody is worried about what direction the Cold War will take. They get a mixed reception in New Zealand; their hard-sell tactics anger many people. As a Jew (Jews don't seek converts), I found it unnerving to read about Jerry's partner lying to an elderly Jewish woman, telling her they were sent by her Rabbi to visit her. Jerry refuses to back up the other missionary's faith statements. Meanwhile, his girlfriend has taken a job as a stewardess so she can see him in New Zealand. I may have to buy this one…

Review Roundup by Libby Cone

by Libby Cone

I have been on another Smashwords adventure, catching book samples on my hard drive as they drop from the conveyor belt of the literary fiction genre. Using this method, I hope to save readers time, energy, and money by reporting on books worth reading, worth sampling, and worth letting fall into oblivion.

The latest offering is Brakenstroom by Jacob Singer, a book of short stories about Jewish emigrants to South Africa. When I noted that only the first ten percent of the book was offered as a free sample, I was concerned that I might not appreciate its essence by reading such a small excerpt. I need not have worried, though. I invite experts on the complicated and tragic history of South Africa to comment on the accuracy of the author's account in the introduction. No expert is needed, however, to find “it's” being used as a possessive pronoun, or an implement for blade sharpening being described as a “wet-stone.” I began to have serious doubts when I read this sentence: “He worked hard, the hours spent pouring over accounting books giving him the stooped scolitic back and chronic myopia that on his tall thin frame, offered a portrait of the Scrooge circumstances had made him.” Then I read this sentence and gave up: “As a boy he was always a head and shoulders taller than others his own age, as thin as a stick, with two large ears on either side of a very Jewish nose.”

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Next is “To Come Back So Far From Nowhere in Particular” by Jon Thorpe. This is a free short story. Unlike the previous work, which dealt with a skinny, four-eared Jewish kid, this story describes the challenges facing suburban Christian youth devoid of bizarre physical deformities. I stopped reading after Page 6, which contains this sentence: “One young woman, Virginia Talbot, someone who would proclaim that Lubeck had seduced and corrupted her and led her astray from her good Christian values, had come forward and admitted Lubeck had arranged meetings with her in seedy hotel room where the two would smoke crack and Lubeck would masturbate as she pleasured herself with a crystal dildo.”

The next book in line is “The Sister City Initiative,” also penned by Mr. Thorpe. Forgive me, readers, for skipping his other ouevre, and the next book in line, which is written in Japanese.

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The next book is “The Album” by Sandra White. It is actually published by “The Fiction Works.” POD purists may skip the rest of this paragraph. Ms. White gets brownie points from me for correct usage and spelling of the words “pored” and “its.” However, after wading through onslaughts of telling-and-not-showing, I was finally defeated by this bit of dialogue: “'It's beautiful out here, Jack. Blakefield's city fathers have done a superb job expanding and building without totally demolishing the wonder of Mother Nature.'”

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Everyone knows the conflicting urges to look, and not to look, at something ghastly. I decided to give in to the desire to look at another short story of Mr. Thorpe, the next story in line, called “Never, Ever, Bring This Up Again.” I am happy that I did, because this cold-war-era story of a failing oil platform (sound familiar?) while somewhat difficult to follow, is actually an attempt at satire. It led me to return to the previous story by Mr. Thorpe, about the crystal dildo, and indeed, satirical narrative followed. My bad. While I did not think either satire was very clever, far be it from me, hoodwinked as I was, to reject Mr. Thorpe's pieces out-of-hand. You may wish to sample them yourself.

As that wasn't much of a ringing endorsement, I proceeded to the next book, “Chips & Gravey,” only to find that it does not seem to be self-published, having already garnered advance comments from the likes of E. Annie Proulx and Atom Egoyan.

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Next in line is Wes Patterson's Wherever You May be Searching. A weird book. A motormouth know-it-all boy has a creepy, borderline-incestuous relationship with his sister, who is just a couple of years younger than he. I think he's supposed to be a "bend-the-rules", "different drummer" sort, but he comes off as controlling and manipulative. Sample it if you wish.

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“107 Degrees Fahrenheit” is another short story by Barry Rachin, whose “Just Like Dostoyevsky” I have reviewed previously. Barry, Barry, Barry, what's with the weird commas? What's with the snappy dialogue like: “'Marauding insects and harsh weather often destroy the eggs. Raising them in captivity helps even the odds they’ll survive to adulthood and reproduce.'”?

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Beyond Redemption – The Forbidden by Jax Alexander. Adjective-noun, adjective-noun, adjective noun, ad nauseam: “Gagging down bile mashed up by the crushing grip, Mike was assaulted by the stench of decaying carrion as he oozed through the clashing colors into the center of the stinking swirl. Toxic thoughts filled with ancient anger forced their way into his head and fouled his mind with an oily presence.” Need I say more?

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Finally (my eyes are crossing), Embrace the Rain by Michael Holloway Perronne. I only read the first thirty pages or so, but it looks good. Technically, it's published by Chances Press, which seems to specialize in gay erotica, but I don't see any encomiums by Edmund White or Sarah Waters, so I'll include it in the self-pub category. A bunch of couples and families, gay and straight, are affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, some in a completely negative way, some in an opportunistic way. The writing is good. Take a look at it.

Real People

Real People
Alison Lurie
146 pages
Random House (1969)

I’m a big fan of the ‘diary novel’ as a genre – i.e. those novels which purport to be the actual journals of fictional characters. I enjoy the unreliability of the narrator, the blend of interiority and external action, and the freedom it gives the narrative to slip into analysis, reflection and anecdote.

Some of the most engaging and enjoyable books I’ve ever read fall into this genre: Saul Bellow’s early novel Dangling Man, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s 1975 Booker-winning Heat and Dust, Evan S. Connell’s Diary of a Rapist (don’t let the title deter you, it’s actually an insider’s vision of the classic disintegration of a schizoid personality) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea which is part-parody of the form and one of the best novels of the twentieth century.

In Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (1984), H. Porter Abbott gives an amusing outline of the genre’s key elements. Though remarkably consistent across the genre, within these apparent "rules" there can be almost infinite variety of stories. In the male version, the diarist is intelligent, sensitive, introverted and self-conscious. He is reasonably alienated with no gift for social life. He is young, in his twenties or early thirties. He is poor and powerless. He is alone. He lives in a room that contains at least two things: a window with a view and a mirror. It is a shabby room in a shabby house. The house is in a city. He walks the city streets. He writes. He paces the room. He gazes out of the window and meditates upon those passing below. At least once in the course of his entries, he looks in the mirror and describes what he sees there. He is either in love or obsessed with that fact that he is not. He is prone to melodrama. He is doomed. There is a good chance he will die. If he dies, there is a good chance he will die by his own hand.

In the female version, the major differences are that the writer is usually married; she is oppressed by the indifference, the insensitivity, or the love of her husband (or lover); she is a victim of the stereotyping imposed on her by virtue of her gender; her powerlessness is a function of her social condition as a woman; her sense of identity is more tenuous; she is less melodramatic.

That all sounds pretty grim, but the diary novel can also be the occasion for great hilarity, as demonstrated by John Updike's A Month of Sundays, Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones novels and Sue Townsend's classic series on the adolescent and adult adventures of Adrian Mole.

One of the most enjoyable examples of the "female version" is Pulitzer-winner Alison Lurie’s 1969 novel, Real People. It was reprinted several times right through to the 1990s, so most good second-hand bookstores will have it – which is precisely where I stumbled across it.

When writers write about writing, the results are usually very interesting. Think of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, and J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. To my mind, Real People is right up there with them. It’s only 146 pages long, but what it lacks in length it more than makes up for in elegance and sophistication.

Janet ‘Belle’ Smith - married, early forties, and the author of a well-received collection of short stories - is taking her annual sojourn at Illyria, a New England mansion which has been converted into an invitation-only retreat for artists of all kinds. Craving escape from a deadening home life, Janet is delighted to find her friend Kenneth is on the guest list, but the appearance of the witless waif Anna May and the husky sculptor Nick Donato threaten to disrupt everything. As Janet struggles to construct new stories she is forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about herself, her companions, and the potential fraudulence of her art.

Lurie chooses Janet’s diary as the narrative device, and it’s an excellent choice for the kind of novel this is: one which deals with the difference between appearance and reality, between social roles and one’s own sense of identity, and in which the protagonist’s reflection on these differences is vital. Apart from constructing a neat snapshot of American art in the 1960s, Lurie deftly explores the familiar crisis of female artistry: the competing claims of being a wife/mother and having a creative career which family members more or less refuse to take seriously.

But this isn’t just about women. It’s about the relationship between art and reality. What starts out as a comedy of manners escalates in profundity until it becomes, in the final pages, a concise manifesto on the nature and purpose of art – which turns out to be truth: “If nothing survives of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.”

Futureproof by N. Frank Daniels (A)

Available from Amazon.com

A fight ensues and the troubled protagonist leaves his home for good. Futureproof is the story of a troubled teen from a troubled family in a troubled world. There is no hope here, no place that offers refuge and no oasis offering sanctuary. There is only desolation, emptiness, and despair which the desperate characters attempt to fill with endless sex in meaningless encounters that devalue the participants and drugs that wash away the tinge of guilt of it all.

One can’t help but feel sorry for Luke. Reader sympathy is evoked, in part, by the way that the author controls the first person point of view. There is a danger when using the first person: the narrator can come across as self-pitying. But here the narrator does not indulge in excessive pity for himself but tells it like it is. And what he tells us is a story of a person trying to fit, to find a place, a role and a purpose in life. But this is not easy when all that one’s life offers is not what one wants.

I’ll never get used to this shit. I’ll never be satisfied doing this work. I can still nail faster than Hank, I can pull up a wall almost as efficiently. But I can’t imagine being thirty, forty years old, and still on my knees, sweating, back aching, one forearm bigger than the other because the right arm is constantly swinging a mallet, right calf muscle gigantic because that leg is used to kick the boards into place just right so that we can fly through another upper-middle class home before heading directly to the next one. I’m making only slightly more money doing this shit than I was pulling in at Andersonville, and every time I think about that it burns me to the core and I want to grab my mallet and hurl it through every fucking window in every fucking house in this artificially contrived “community.”

Luke is a member of an entire subculture of lost souls. His meanderings through life end, temporarily, when he manages to get a job as a floor installer. There he meets a man, Hank, who used to work in the mines. In a scene where Luke attempts to engage Hank in a bit of class consciousness raising conversation, Hank is revealed as a completely downtrodden man, a member of the working class who is incapable of thinking about anything except his own immediate situation and survival. Unlike the sex and drug addicted contemporaries of Luke who are trying to dull out their pain, Hank seems to have disintegrated as a human being, becoming instead a kind of robot whose life is defined by his role as a bottom rung worker. This is what Luke does not want to become but it is the only option that life seems to have for him and his friends. Surely, there is more, somewhere. College and the hopes and aspirations that go with it are not an option here, all that is left is some soul-deadening job, usually manual labor, which offers nothing beyond a meager paycheck. He is not alone in his desire to escape the ravages of the pointlessness of existence. Many members of the X Generation want to rebel against the deadening of the soul, but end up getting medicated.

Those of us that do make it back from the storied institutions tell tales of our parents ruining our lives by sending us to “Peach Ridge” and “Windswept Meadows.” They could be the names of apartment complexes if you didn’t know better. But we know all about them. These places are revolving doors. They drain our parents’ health insurance and then turn us loose more fucked up than we were before. I am an anomaly among most of the kids I meet, though, who count days spent in treatment like tours of duty. Institutionalization is our Viet Nam. And in some way I’m ashamed of never having been shipped anywhere, a draft dodger shirking his duty, squatting in Canadian parks and bus stations until the shit blows over.

The book deals with the tension between idealism and the brutal realities of existence; between faith and the need to believe and the presence of death and decay. Out of this tension comes Luke’s struggle with himself and others like him. In earlier times, this tension would have given rise, perhaps, to some movement, as it did in the 60s. Unfortunately this struggle is no longer seen as legitimate by the society. In the 90s, Salinger’s protagonist would have been forced to take Prozac. Luke’s friends are committed by their parents. The search for meaning of existence has been declared, by the unholy union of big pharma and psychiatry, to be a sign of mental illness. The Woodstock generation has been aborted by Prozac.

Futureproof is a powerful story about the struggle for meaning and hope in a dead world, tracing expertly the course of progress of a man traversing the desolation of poverty and the impact of the journey on himself. Not to be missed.