[REVIEW] Train Shots by Vanessa Blakeslee

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

145 pages, $15.00

Review by Denton Loving

Vanessa Blakeslee writes across genres, and her first collection of short stories, Train Shots, reflects how widely she has been published (credits within Train Shots alone include The Southern Review, Madison Review and Harpur Palate among others). These stories illustrate Blakeslee’s ability to inhabit the minds and voices of wildly different narrators and characters, though their common denominator is in the search for a safe place to belong.

Opening the collection is “Clock In,” a first-person point-of-view story written in direct address that immediately pulls the reader in as a new server at a restaurant. “First we’ll clock you in on the computer and then you can shadow me,” the story starts, and then the narrator proceeds to give “you” the entire scoop on the restaurant’s other employees. Blakeslee’s talents are truly highlighted in this story, expertly revealing a set of quirky characters in a remarkably short three pages.

Blakeslee’s craft is more subtle in other stories, even though her ambition pokes through again and again in beautiful sentences and her unique insight. In “Ask Jesus,” a man faces a cheating wife. In “Barbecue Rabbit,” a woman is challenged by a destructive, abusive, out-of-control son. In “Hospice of the Au Pair,” a doctor entertains the notion of a “home abortion” against his mistress’s will. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Songs for the Deaf, by John Henry Fleming

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Burrow Press
172 pages, $15

Review by Thomas Michael Duncan

For one reason or another, so much short fiction is preoccupied with everyday people. Perhaps because ordinary, relatable characters are the quickest and easiest way to connect with readers. Of course, quickest and easiest are not synonyms for best.

The characters in John Henry Fleming’s stories are not ordinary. Take the father in “Chomolungma.” When a crisis threatens to tear his family apart, the man of the house takes drastic measures. Or maybe “drastic” isn’t the right word. “Insane” might be a better descriptor. He orchestrates a leisurely family outing to the peak of Mount Everest. But with the family strapped for cash, he can only afford “discount Sherpas” who “can’t even tie their own shoelaces.” A lack of physical conditioning, proper equipment and provisions, bone-chilling walks along shaky ladders spanning deadly chasms—these perilous obstacles are mole hills to this man. The basic idea is noble, to unite the family by working together to reach a common goal. But the father pits his family against an unconquerable opponent, dooming them from the start. His wife and son succumb to delirium, and his daughter begins an ill-fated romance with one of the young, cheap Sherpas. Continue reading →

15 Views of Orlando, Nathan Holic, Ed. (A Review by Ally Nicholl)

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Roxane Gay

Burrow Press

184 pgs/$15

For me, Orlando was always the theme park advert that came on before Lady & the Tramp. When I was a prepubescent whippersnapper living along the drizzly east coast of Scotland, Florida seemed like paradise; a mythical, blue-skied utopia full of cartoon characters and ice cream. Somehow that childhood image stuck and, although the common-sense part of me knew that there must be a real city behind all that gloss, I never quite managed to shake the association with leaping dolphins and laughing families on water slides.

This is the kind of association that 15 Views of Orlando editor Nathan Holic is all too aware of. As he points out in his introduction to the anthology, while cities such as New York and Chicago have had their true personalities captured by innumerable books, films and TV shows, Orlando has largely remained a one-dimensional House of Mouse caricature. The writers featured in this collection, all of them Orlando residents past or present, offer a spirited counter to this. Their short stories take the reader to bars, clubs, shopping malls, downtown swamps and hidden lakes, exploring the many facets of the city as only native Orlando-dwellers could.

Gene Albamonte sets a sweet, nostalgic tone with ‘Tunneling’, in which a young restaurant worker reminisces about his best friend Brian, a G.I. who has been sent off to Afghanistan. Oviedo, the north-eastern suburb of Orlando in which he grew up, is infused with memories, from Brian’s old house to such unlikely triggers as “the scent of cow patties” and the tire depot, “with masses of black rubber stacked in the yard like mountains at dusk”.

The writers are honest about their city, willing to lay bare its blemishes. In ‘Lifting Veils’, Jay Haffner likens the humidity to “breathing through a heavy wool blanket”; in Chris Heavener’s ‘Cons’ the narrator’s girlfriend has a notepad full of the pros and cons of moving to Orlando, picking out the racial segregation, the poorly-rated public transport system and “Walt Mother Fucking Disney World”. Hunter Choate’s ‘The Gentlest of Bends’ follows the down-on-his-luck Perkin through Orlando’s notorious red light district along the Orange Blossom Trail, past “twitch-headed boys” and “the whores with their pirate smiles and mosquito-lumped legs”. Elsewhere there is darkness lurking in the depths of Lake Keogh (‘A Dry Fountain’ by Tom DeBeauchamp) and in Florida Hospital (‘Heart’ by Lindsay Hunter). Continue reading →