David S. Atkinson

[REVIEW] The Devils That Have Come to Stay by Pamela DiFrancesco

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Devils

Medallion Press

304 pages, $14.95

 

Review by David S. Atkinson

 

I’m not particularly drawn to westerns, though I will read anything that appears well written, but I was curious when I heard Pamela DiFrancesco’s debut novel (her fiction has appeared in such places as Cezanne’s Carrot, Monkeybicycle, The Carolina Quarterly, and The New Ohio Review so she’s definitely a seasoned writer despite this being a debut) The Devils That Have Come to Stay described as an acid western. What was an acid western? I admit: I was intrigued.

A nameless man tends his saloon and misses his wife, who is off caring for her ailing mother, in the midst of the increasingly sick Gold Rush landscape. A mysterious diseased Indian comes in, and then an equally mysterious gold-toothed stranger looking for the diseased Indian and the gold that the diseased Indian has taken from him. The nameless man decides it is time to rejoin his wife. His wandering through the brutal and often metaphorical western land is The Devils That Have Come to Stay. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] American Past Time, by Len Joy

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American

Hark! New Era Publishing

335 pages, $5.99

 

Review by David S. Atkinson

 

Len Joy had his work cut out for him when I picked up American Past Time. The book centers on a 1950’s minor league baseball star who has to live with blowing his big shot. However, I’m not into baseball. Still, I could trust Len Joy’s writing chops since his work appears in places such as Annalemma, Hobart, 3AM Magazine, and The Foundling Review. Given that Joy is a competitive age-group triathlete, it also seemed he might have something interesting to say about the (to me) foreign world of athletics. I decided to give the book a shot. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] What Happened Here, by Bonnie ZoBell

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Zo Bell

Press 53
192 pages, $17.95

 

Review by David S. Atkinson

 

Some people believe each of us is ultimately alone in life, alone with our dreams, fears, and the ghosts that haunt us. However, others insist our individual problems are just variations on what others experience and we are more connected to each other than we can possibly imagine. I found myself thinking about these two positions while reading What Happened Here by Bonnie ZoBell.

This book is a linked collection of stories and a novella centering around a neighborhood in North Park, San Diego where PSA Flight 182 crashed horribly in 1978. The crash was long ago, but the characters in the various pieces reflect upon the tragedy, mysteriously affected in some way, while going about their own lives, lives filled with their individual problems and hopes:

The accident was posed to me as a ghoulish fringe benefit by the previous owner of my house. I’d be able to say I resided in a place where the tragedy had occurred….I worried about how the annihilation of these bodies that landed on my property would affect me. Would I feel engulfed by doom simply living on this patch of earth? I’d had bouts of depression. I didn’t need to think about dead families sprawled on my back patio, even if it had been decades. But while I’d never be cured of this incessant disease, my own particular strain had been restrained after too many years of therapy and a lifetime of commitment to antidepressants. My husband’s had not. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] You Are Sloth, by Steve Lowe

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Sloth

 

Eraserhead Press

150 pages, $10.95

 

Review by David S. Atkinson

 

I’d never heard of bizarro lit before a few years ago. However, I’ve read what I would consider a decent amount of it lately. It seems like I should have a handle on exactly what is or isn’t bizarro by now…but I really don’t. For what seems to be a somewhat small genre in literature as a whole, there appears to be at least twice as many ways to do bizarro as there are writers within the field. My impressions of this were further cemented when I took a recent look at You Are Sloth by Steve Lowe (author of humorously odd books such as King of the Perverts, Muscle Memory, and Samurai VS Robo-Dick).

The book starts ordinarily enough:

            The dude writes, “You are sloth!” and that’s how it begins.
Bam, sloth.
He didn’t write “a sloth,” just sloth, and that has you wondering what he means. It concerns you a little that this is some kind of Se7en thing where you’re going to die in a very lazy way because some foreign spammer has seen too many American movies without quite grasping their gist.

***

But that wasn’t what he meant.
When he says, “You are sloth,” he’s being quite literal, but in your hangover haze, that just flies right on by. You just don’t get it until you reach for the keyboard to respond and instead spend ten minutes staring at your yellow, curved fingernails (three to be exact; you count them over and over to confirm) and thin paws covered in long, wiry hair. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Aversive Clause, by B.C. Edwards

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~ by David S. Atkinson

9781937854249

Black Lawrence Press

$16/180 pgs

I always hate to display my ignorance, but I will be forthcoming here and admit that I was not familiar with the work of B. C. Edwards before grabbing a copy of his short story collection The Aversive Clause. However, despite my unfamiliarity and despite this being Edward’s first prose book (he is also the author of the poetry collection To Mend Small Children), I still had high expectations.

After all, The Aversive Clause was the winner of the 2011 Hudson Prize. In addition to a long list of journal publications, Edwards has been nominated for a Pushcart and is a Literary Death Match Champion. I’ve even heard that one of the stories in this collection (“Illfit”) is being adapted by the Royal Ballet of Flanders. To make a long story short, I was expecting great things when I opened the cover.

Having opened this review in such a manner, I should immediately turn to whether or not my high expectations were satisfied. By way of answering my own question, let’s take a look at a portion from “The City of God is Your Town, America…If You Make an Effort!” as an example:

God descended to Earth into a lackluster soybean field somewhere in Kansas. “No,” he said when we asked him if it was the end of the world. “Oh heavens no, no, no,” and he waved his god-hands furiously causing minute divine ripples through the heat that ruined all our hairstyles. “No, really, no.” And God smiled like he was trying to convince us and him at the same time. And his smile was strange, awkward like the handshakes when you don’t realize you’ve met someone before and reintroduce yourself. Continue reading →

jimmy lagowski saves the world by Pat Pujolas (a Review by David S. Atkinson)

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Independent Talent Group

198 pgs/$12

When I first picked up jimmy lagowski saves the world, the short story collection debut by Pat Pujolas, I was expecting to read a funny little book. Really, that’s all I’d thought from the summary on the back. The twin epigraphs hadn’t really changed my mind, the first being the quote “All men are created equal” from Thomas Jefferson and the second, attributed to the character Jimmy Lagowski himself, being “Thomas Jefferson was a dick.” After reading one or two stories, however, I decided that jimmy lagowski saves the world was a collection that evokes tender emotion through the bare humanity of the characters. This bit from “State Park Resort” is a perfect example:

A few hours later, he emerges from the arts and crafts barn, victorious. She’s going to love this dog, this gift from Henry. In his excitement, he runs down the dusty road, past the game-room, past the other campers and tents, all the way to the Martin Family’s camper. Joann is eating lunch at the picnic table, and Henry runs to her side, presenting the dog to her, with both hands, like a trophy.

*****

“It’s so adorable,” Joann says. “I’m going to call him Henry.”

A knife, straight to the heart; his cheeks fill with blood again.

Joann pats the statute on its head. “Good little Henry. He’s a good little boy.”

Inside, Henry thinks, don’t call it that. Please don’t call it that. Call it anything in the worlds but that. Inside, this is what Henry thinks.

 

In short, a twelve-year-old boy makes himself vulnerable in a valiant and creative attempt to win the young girl he loves, only to have her unwittingly demonstrate that she considers more of a friendly puppy than a suitor. Continue reading →

A Glimpse of the Numinous by Jeff Gardiner (A Review by David S. Atkinson)

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Eibonvale Press (UK)

170 pgs/£18.99

There is something about characters coming into contact with something larger than themselves that makes for particularly compelling fiction. I don’t mean events larger than themselves, more of reaching for aspects of existence that transcend the experience in their particular world. Call it what you will: the other, god, correlated contents; that outward reaching seems to cause some kind of magnetic imbalance, tugging the reader inward inversely to the outward reaching of the characters.

The reaching of the characters in the stories of Jeff Gardiner’s A Glimpse of the Numinous certainly exerted that kind of pull for me. A man who finds a way to make his fears visible in order to face them? A woman approached by a stranger who claims to be in love with her and know everything about her? A boy who finally reaches out to a friend without awareness or concern regarding what the darkness in his own life will bring about? I like fiction about ordinary lives as much as the next person, but I cannot deny the pull of “the other.”

The opening portion of the title story is actually a wonderful way to explain how it felt to start reading this book:

“We haven’t made love for over a year now. Then one day a few weeks ago I was quite shocked when Helen began to masturbate in bed beside me in the early hours of the morning…But the first time this happened, her moaning woke me and I thought she was having nightmares but when I tried to shake her she pushed me away. In the darkness I could hear and feel her reaching climaxes of ecstasy that she had certainly never experienced with me.

Dan paused for a while and would not catch my eye, for which I was grateful, as I wasn’t really sure I wanted to hear this, but it was too late to stop him now.

Continue reading →

Last Call in the City of Bridges by Salvatore Pane (A Review by David S. Atkinson)

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Braddock Avenue Books

$16

 

I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that this is not an age of disconnection. More and more of our interpersonal communications take place electronically. Even our news sources are becoming increasingly specialized, one news source for Republicans and another for Democrats, with the result that we don’t really connect even when we need to. As in past eras, we can turn to art and literature to try to come to terms with our changes world and how a person might survive within it.

However, necessary though this view into modern disconnection is, there is a problem with exploring this in fiction. After all, the issue is disconnection. How can an author depicting disconnection do so in any meaningful way while still connecting the reader to the story? If the story fails to connect with readers, then readers will not be engaged and the story goes unread. We are talking about disconnect, after all. Last Call in the City of Bridges is definitely a book that has to come to terms with this particularly thorny issue.

Michael Bishop, the main character of Salvatore Pane’s Last Call in the City of Bridges, opens his story on what is a night of hope for him, election night 2004:

It was supposed to be the greatest night of our lives. By our, I mean my entire generation, all those unlucky souls raised on the 8-bit wastelands manufactured by Nintendo, all those boys and girls who watched the Berlin Wall crumble in kindergarten, the Twin Towers in high school. Overeducated, Twittering, viral…Election Night was supposed to be our moment, but not all of us were ready to believe. Continue reading →