Denton Loving

[REVIEW] Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, edited by Clifford Garstang

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Everywhere

Press 53

234 pages, $19.95

 

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

 

“You just don’t know who your enemies are. And your enemies are so often your friends, Molly. It will always be like this, I fear,” says Lana, the narrator of Alden Jones’ “Heathens,” one of twenty stories collected from twenty different authors from around the world and edited by Clifford Garstang in Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet.

Lana is an American teaching in a village in Costa Rica. She is well loved by her students and the community, but in the story, she is caught up in teaching a lesson of a darker kind to Molly, a teenaged innocent visiting Costa Rica as part of a group of fly-by Evangelical missionaries.

Lana discovers that the world is dangerous, which is also Garstang’s first thought in his introduction to the collection. These diverse stories range from every continent, from toothless bikers in New Zealand to young women approaching adulthood in the Congo, from a boar attack in a German park to a suicide bomb in Israel. If these stories share a single theme, it is of this danger that permeates our human existence, regardless of our geographic location. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Where Alligators Sleep by Sheldon Lee Compton

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 alligators

 

Foxhead Books

160 pages, $18.00

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

“What is so interesting at your feet? It’s only your destiny,” writes Sheldon Lee Compton in his story, “Ouroboros,” which opens his new collection of flash fiction, Where Alligators Sleep. The question of destiny is perhaps the most over-arching theme in these 66 short shorts. In the title story, Compton crisscrosses time, depicting an elderly couple in 2008 who survive by remembering their first dance together in 1951. He writes, “There is sadness all around, spread out like mud through a hog pen.” In other words, destiny isn’t kind to any of us.

This tragic view of human suffering is depicted most uniquely in the story, “Assignment,” where physical and learning disabilities in students are likened to assignments drawn blindly from a bag. We all get one whether we want it or not. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] My Family and Other Hazards, by June Melby

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Family
Henry Holt and Co.
320 pages, $25.00


Review by Denton Loving

When June Melby’s family decided to buy the Tom Thumb Miniature Golf course in Waupaca, Wisconsin, nobody understood the myriad ways such a game would affect and influence their family. Melby’s memoir, My Family and Other Hazards, details their relationship with the game of mini-golf, both as a business and as one of the constants in their lives. But Melby’s narrative isn’t merely childhood reminiscence, and although Melby reports about the interesting history of mini-golf, it’s so much more than an historical account.

Melby’s cleverness should be noted in many ways, most obviously with the book’s framework—eighteen chapters, one for every hole in the course. But the beginning of the course isn’t exactly the beginning of the story. The force behind this recounting of Tom Thumb’s history begins with a moment of crisis when Melby’s parents plan to sell the course. Continue reading →

[REVIEW]The Pulpit vs. The Hole, by Jay Shearer

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Pulpit

Gold Lion Press

53 pages, $10.00

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

 

Jay Shearer is the author of the novel Five Hundred Sirens (Cairn Press, May 2014) and the short story collection How Exquisite the Dead Girl (finalist for the 2013 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction). His novella, The Pulpit vs. The Hole, was understandably selected by Percival Everett as winner of the Gold Line Press chapbook competition.

In The Pulpit vs. The Hole, Shearer gives a coming-of-age story like few others.  This is a contemporary tale that takes place at an aptly-named summer camp, Camp Abednego, in Eastern Pennsylvania.  Here Shearer presents the age-old questions that always arise when good and evil must confront each other.  What makes Shearer’s story so powerful are the unique setting and circumstances in which the questions are asked. Continue reading →

Interview with Charles Dodd White

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–by Denton Loving

Denton Loving:  Congratulations on your new novel, A Shelter of Others.  You’ve previously published the novel, Lambs of Men, and the story collection, Sinners of Sanction County.  Do you have a preference between the short form and the long form?

Charles Dodd White: I believe I’m best suited to compression, but I like what can be done with a longer work, especially something in the amorphous novella/short novel range. I like the idea of extensive brevity, especially the kind of control typically applied to a more developed story.

DL:  I think of you as a fairly prolific writer.  How long did it take to write this novel? Continue reading →

[REVIEW] A Shelter of Others, by Charles Dodd White

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shelter

Fiddleblack Press

216 pages, $14.00

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

Charles Dodd White returns to the fictional landscape of Sanction County in his new novel, A Shelter of Others.  Like his previous publications (the novel Lambs of Men and the story collection Sinners of Sanction County), White masterfully depicts the dark, inner lives of broken characters.

A Shelter of Others centers on Mason Laws, just released from two years in prison for trafficking pills; Mason’s father, Sam, an aging, former college professor; and Mason’s wife, Lavada, who has cared for Sam during Mason’s incarceration.  Mason is only begrudgingly grateful for Lavada’s care of his father.  More so, he’s hurt and angry that she never visited him even once during his time in prison.  When he’s released, he doesn’t let Lavada know.  Instead, he ekes out a thin life on an abandoned timber camp until he finds a job at a run-down, one-room store near the college where Sam used to teach.  Continue reading →

[REVIEW] What the Zhang Boys Know, by Clifford Garstang

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What_the_Zhang_Boys_Know_cover

Press 53
218 pages, $17.95

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

The title of Clifford Garstang’s novel in stories, What the Zhang Boys Know, is abbreviated from one of the book’s central stories, “What the Zhang Boys Know About Life on Planet Earth.”  While the Zhang boys, Simon and Wesley, are influenced by events long before their lifetimes and places far away, their lives are centered on a questionable part of Chinatown in Washington, D.C. and specifically on a condominium building called The Nanking Mansion.

Despite the title’s implications, the Zhang family is not explored in these stories any more than the other residents of the condominium complex.  Simon and Wesley Zhang, along with the building, serve as a framework to explore an intricately-woven series of relationships between neighbors.  These are people who often appear to have very little in common with each other, at least on the surface.  But all of them have suffered incredible losses.  They are alternately failing and succeeding the rough navigation through life. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Whiskey Baron by Jon Sealy

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Whiskey Baron cover image

Hub City Press

264 pages, $26.00

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

 

            Jon Sealy’s debut novel, The Whiskey Baron, begins with the not-very-mysterious deaths of two young men outside a known whiskey mill in Prohibition-era South Carolina.  These men have both been shot down in the middle of the night, their bodies left in the street.  What follows is not a mystery of who committed the crime as much as a beautiful and brilliant exploration of a Carolina mill town—intricately bound in violence and vice—unravelling at its core.

Center stage in this story is a man named Mary Jane Hopewell, accused of the murders but known better as a drunk.  Mary Jane is injured himself, barely escaping the first gun fight and then disappearing from Sealy’s fictional Castle County.  Two men are looking for Mary Jane, each desperate to find him first.  One is Furman Chambers, Castle County’s aging sheriff.  The other is Larthan Tull, the man whose liquor supplies a powerful bootleg distributor for the entire Southern region.  The different paths of these two men are emphasized by their similarities, and much of the essence of the novel is revealed in their conversations with each other:

“You never know what kind of violence the human beast is capable of, Furman, once he sees through the illusion of free will.”

“Free will.”

“We’re all locked on a stage here.  You’ve got a job to do.  I’ve got a job to do.  Mary Jane’s job was to get drunk.  As long as we play our parts, everything runs along smoothly.  The show goes on.  It’s only when the curtain is pulled back and we see the scaffolding and the strings that we realize something is amiss.  And then, who knows?” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Train Shots by Vanessa Blakeslee

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Vanessa Blakeslee's Train Shots cover photo

 

Burrow Press

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] The Skin Team, by Jordaan Mason

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Cover Image of Jordaan Mason's The Skin Tteam

Magic Helicopter Press
$15.00/226 pgs.

Review by Denton Loving

Jordaan Mason is a Canadian filmmaker, musician (Jordaan Mason and the Horse Museum) and writer (with work in UNSAID, The Scrambler, Everyday Genius, NOÖ Journal, and red lightbulbs). His debut novel, The Skin Team, is a dream-like story about a two boys and a girl—a love triangle of sorts—that is shaped by intense violence and energetic forces beyond understanding. In The Skin Team, Mason explores a number of subjects that include the shifting border between love and sex, as well as the noise and force of energy. What happens when we absorb too much power? And what happens when the lights go out?

First, there is a sick boy called Synesthesia. He describes his sickness to his doctor like this: “my stomach is going blind, I can’t taste anything except ash, do you think that I swallowed fire while I was sleeping, is that possible.” What he doesn’t share with his doctor but “what should be noted is the level of exploration that would happen…i.e. how my body found many ways to experience the energy depending on where I was in relation to the building.” Continue reading →