Featherproof Books

217 pages

OK, before I dive into this review, I feel compelled to offer my two cents on an issue I personally feel is pressing.

“Experimental literature” is kind of a nebulous term and ultimately a misnomer. Though it’s not a misnomer in the typical misnomery way people simply [mis]use terms out of context, but rather in a way that is almost insulting to those writers writing literature in a way that is considered “Experimental” by others—where calling the writing “Experimental” is ostensibly pejorative: “Man, this shit is weird! So it must just, like, be an experiment, right?” Weird and Experimental become synonyms. It (i.e. Experimental) becomes a term that gets applied when a work is different, difficult, or breaks with established conventions.

And that way of thinking is lazy.

This phenomenon is similar to calling someone like Zach Schomburg’s poetry “Surrealist” poetry (with a capital-S). Schomburg would tell you—in a really nice way because he is an incredibly nice guy—that the Surrealist poets were from a different era, the past, and that they were their own movement. So it’s fair to call his poetry “surreal” (with a small-s), but don’t call him a Surrealist.

Lindsay Hunter’s Daddy’s qualifies as small-e experimental literature. Her prose is unconventional and it certainly decenters the reader from his or her preconceived notions of how to read a book. For starters, you read Daddy’s from the top-down rather than from left to right. The reader is immediately forced to reorient him- or herself to the text even before reading the first word (an effect that might be lost in digital translation on an eReader).

However, Daddy’s is not as utterly convention-busting as Johannes Göransson’s Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate or Darby Larson’s The Iguana Complex. Hunter is still very much interested in allowing the reader to feel at least slightly grounded in most of her stories (more so in others), allowing the reader’s brain to wander a little and imagine the scene that is unfolding on the vertically-oriented page (as opposed to Göransson’s and Larson’s books that force the reader to pay attention to the text on a sentence-to-sentence level and appreciate the wordplay and technical fireworks occurring in the details each author has painstakingly implemented).

Another example of Hunter’s unconventionality occurs when you try to figure out what Daddy’s actually is. A few stories into the book, I tweeted Roxane Gay: “I’m not entirely sure if this is a story collection, a story collection-as-novel (a la Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas), or just an experimental novel.” After which, I add: “The greatest part is that it doesn’t really matter!”

And it doesn’t. Matter, that is—it really doesn’t.

Some of the chapter-/ section-/ story-breaks have dialog placed in quotation marks. Others do not. But whether or not what is being said is in quotes, you immediately see that Hunter’s decision was ultimately the right one for creating maximal effect. You, as the reader, trust her with all aspects of this universe that she is hurtling you through.

And therein lies the glue that holds Daddy’s together: its universe. Whether or not the stories seem connected by way of an overall story arc does not matter—you just know the given elements belong together. This also reveals Hunter’s genius: some stories are more experimental than others. Some are more narrative-focused.

I wonder if it’s possible that an air bubble got injected into his bloodstream in the crash somehow, that it will reach his heart and he’ll go down, his heart exploding like a firecracker in an apple.

Some are more focused on the interplay between individual words and sentences.

I want to tell her something that would shock her—something like, I had a dream I was licking your dad’s hairy chest, or, the lightning in your eyes looks like cinnamon floss, or, You’re ugly.

In summation: this is yet another shining collection of fiction from Featherproof Books (Christian TeBordo’s The Awful Possibilities, Patrick Sommerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Amelia Gray’s AM/PM, Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas). The stories are unforgettable and will likely resonate with you on about 50 different levels. There’s an extremely good reason this is so popular around the PANK-O-Sphere, and that’s because this is an extremely good book!

*

Joseph Michael Owens has written for PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, The Houston Literary Review, InDigest Magazine and Grey Sparrow Journal (CELJ’s Best New Literary Journal of 2010), where he is a regular contributor to its “Man on Campus” section and an associate editor. Additionally, his short story “We Always Trust Each Other, Except for When We Don’t” was nominated for both Dzanc Books‘ Best of the Web 2011 anthology and storySouth‘s Million Writers Award. Joe lives in Omaha with five dogs and one wife.

Etruscan Press

$12.75

Perhaps I am just prejudiced against historical novels, but to me there seems to be a distinction between historical novels and novels that are set in a historical place and time.  In the way I draw the line between these two types of books, I see historical novels as more a love affair with the image of a particular place or time.  As a reader, I get the impression that the author of a historical novel paints a pretty picture and then tells the reader to sit back and appreciate it for a while.  Any characters or story seem to be a secondary consideration, something to prop up the pretty picture rather than elements of serious concern.

The historically set novel on the other hand, again as I personally draw the distinction, seems to rest the primary focus on the characters and the story.  The historical place or time is still a vitally important element, but something is going on as opposed to a vicariously experienced zeitgeist.

Having blathered more than enough now about how I would categorize different books, I would certainly classify The Gambler’s Nephew as a novel that is historically set.  The central importance here is the story of a particular community of characters, not shallow appreciation of a different time or place.  Certainly, the story takes place in a vividly and accurately created civil-war era rural community in Ohio.  Further, the story is heavily tied to slavery, abolitionism, and the prevalent attitudes of the time regarding such.  However, this setting is subservient to the story as opposed to the other way around.  This is evident from the very first lines of the book:

“Years ago, way back in the 1850s, there was a wealthy merchant in the little Ohio River town of Brackenport by name of Nehemiah Dawes who got to brooding over slavery and grave robbing so much that his mind became unbalanced.  Hardly any of the townsfolk understood these passions of his, not so much because of what he believed as how hard he worked at it.  Even those who sympathized with his views and agreed with him that the abolition of slavery was all right and grave robbing was all wrong; even those people figured there had to be a limit to how much you should let such principles interfere with your peace of mind.  Not to mention that of your neighbors.”

In addition to demonstrating the serious focus to story and character to which The Gambler’s Nephew adheres, the above opening paragraph also showcases another aspect of this book that interested me, and in fact interested me most of all in the book.  I am referring to the way that the thoughts of characters are presented with a distance and a selection that reveals the inner foibles and failings of which the characters themselves are unaware.

Now, The Gambler’s Nephew is presented by a central narrative voice.  However, that central narrative voice shares certain insights into the mental workings of the characters of the community and those insights, though voiced in the words of the characters, elucidate aspects of the characters of which they themselves are not completely aware.

For example, the narrator notes that the brothers of Nehemiah’s deceased wife become incensed because:

“Nehemiah had buried their sister in one of the worst spots in the entire graveyard, humiliating the Kittles.  There her grave was, a disgrace for everybody to gaze upon, scarcely ten feet above the flood line.  Maybe eight.  But for himself, Nehemiah had bought the loftiest and most expensive plot of all, high above the river where the gravestone could look down with scorn upon the steamboats that plied and labored their way up and down the channel in their pursuit of plenty as decreed by the god of commerce.”

However, as straightforward as these sentiments might seem, the brothers had voiced no objection when their sister was buried.  They had not even voiced an objection when Nehemiah buried a slave in this prized spot, out of guilt relating to having caused the slave’s death, instead of himself.

To the contrary, after these events have taken place, the narrator remarks that:

“Jacob and Henry Kittle verged upon being two of the town’s respectable citizens, in spite of the fact that neither of them belonged to a church.  They certainly didn’t belong to the ruffian class, and it was widely held that they showed no disposition in that direction – at least until recently, when Jacob got it into his head to start brooding over the insult to their poor sister’s corpse.”

Though the above quotes let readers into the mind of the brothers, they show the reader things about the brothers that they themselves are not aware.  If they were truly defending their slighted sister, why did they wait so long to become enraged?  In an offhand, almost comic kind of way, the narrator lets the reader in on the secret that these brothers have much more of a problem with Nehemiah himself and merely delude themselves about being angry over family honor.

This indirect manner of revelation about the characters making up this community pervades the book, providing delightful secretive discovery after another for the reader.  For me, this is one of the most magical aspects of what Matthews has accomplished in this work.  After all, many readers have read about the sorts of events that occurred in rural communities at near the end of slavery in America.  However, those readers have not experienced the hidden essential human hearts of characters in such a community.  For that, readers can enjoy The Gambler’s Nephew.

*

David S. Atkinson is a Nebraska-born writer currently living in Denver.  He holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska.  His stories have appeared in (and/or are soon to be appearing in) “Gray Sparrow,” “Children Churches and Daddies,” “Split Quarterly,” “Cannoli Pie,” “C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag,” “Atticus Review,” “Brave Blue Mice,” and “Fine Lines.”  His book reviews have appeared in “Gently Read Literature,” “The Rumpus,” and “All Things Pankish.”  The web site dedicated to his writing can be found at http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/.  He currently serves as a reader for “Gray Sparrow” and in his non-literary time he works as a patent attorney in Denver.

Folded Word Press

$14

It isn’t often that a story allows us to simply muse, to contemplate the high and the low of things, but Mel Bosworth’s Freight does just that.  This novel is aware of its own kind of weight by allowing the reader to travel along with a single character through an odyssey of whimsical observations and difficult realizations.  Airport security check points, with the trays and lines of passengers removing shoes and articles of clothing, are described as “slumber parties.”  Dealing with personal pain, addiction, loss, and longing is described as “eating yourself like a black hole, like a collapsing star.”  The profound is thrown in relief against the mundane like paints splashed on a canvas. You understand this about Freight when you read such lines as, “Experience is my favorite color.”

Freight is as a much a story about the journey of this nameless character through the hills and valleys of alcohol and food addition as it is the passage through other peoples’ lives that were a part of his experience; travels through destructive relationships and memories of better times, screeching halts at points of self-destruction, and sometimes just the flow of an ordinary life.  Bosworth conveys this flowing through time and memory with great beauty with lines like:

“We are planets, each of us.  Orbiting. Bumping. Smashing. Collapsing into black holes.”

It is also this musing, contemplative tone of Freight that sometimes gets in its own way a bit, with a telescopic look not just at the mundane, but at minutiae. There are passages that wonder whether hands have brains.  Or share a brain.  Or whether brains can be in thumbs.  We lumber with the character after he eats an entire pizza, and looks into a toilet that “grinned” after he vomits into it.

Oddly enough, while descriptors of bodily functions were not at the top of my list for narrative appeal, Freight does have a wonderful way of likening human experiences to the physicality of things carried, lost, or found, and this is where Bosworth’s storytelling is quite unique— not to mention the shifting puzzle piece fun of reading one section and being given a page key to skip to another part of the book to read a corresponding section.

Perhaps Freight’s greatest gift is allowing us to ponder about what has happened to the character and what it means for him, as well as wonder about things (great and small) that we might otherwise not stop and think about.  There is a certain level of honesty in Bosworth’s writing that has plain and simple appeal. We think about the notion that “nothing ever goes away and nothing ever dies.”  Memories lift from the page.  I was pulled into my own fond childhood memory of bare feet on wet grass right alongside the narrator.  I thought about what I’d wanted to forget, or what I thought I’d wanted to forget too.  Freight may be one of the few books where there is plenty of room to bring in one’s own baggage, have a seat, and enjoy the ride.

*

Morowa Yejidé’s short stories have appeared in the Istanbul Literary Review, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, The Taj Mahal Review, Underground Voices, The Adirondack Review, and others.  Her story “To Do List” was a 2011 Dzanc Books Best of the Web nominee by Jersey Devil Press.  Her story “Tokyo Chocolate” was one of the ten stories published in the 2009 Willesden Herald Anthology, and was nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize. She is also the 2010 recipient of the Norris Church Mailer Scholarship for creative writing from Wilkes University.

Available October 2011 from Two Dollar Radio

208 pages

$16.00

“A life without art was like skin without tattoos, boring and empty and pale.”    – Joshua Mohr (Damascus)

We’ve all been to seedy bars. Hell, some of us practically live there, and the characters you meet in those dark bars, in the shadows, hiding from the world, themselves, reality, or whatever, are the denizens of Joshua Mohr’s beautifully macabre Damascus. This novel about the lives that intersect and collide at a bar in the Mission District of San Francisco is laced with apparent immorality, grimy lifestyles, poor life choices, and various denials and excuses employed by the characters. But once you get past the wonderfully abrasive prose, acidic language, and the notion that Bukowski is smiling somewhere in revelry, you will find that the characters are not what you originally thought. It is the surprisingly tender moments that you never expect and the real depth to the characters that breathe life into Damascus (the bar and the book), and me as a reader and writer.

Having not read Joshua Mohr’s first two novels, I began reading Damascus unprepared, but before the first page of the story, I found a comparison of his previous work to Bukowski, and I was immediately hooked. Although the style is different (Mohr is more traditional with his punctuation – he actually uses it), along with the voice – both of which are unique to Mohr – the characters we meet are just what you might expect from the Poet Laureate of Skid Row.

“Deception was the norm: cab drivers disclosed that they were venture capitalists; rickety alcoholics morphed into ex-athletes; those with anonymous office jobs had recently retired from the cubicle because of an important invention. (One bloke even tried to convince a woman that he masterminded the Caps Lock key.)”

Then there is Shambles, a middle aged woman who steals the show. She gives hand jobs in the bathroom to supplement her income, and she wants nothing more than that from her male clients, or any male she meets. No Eyebrows, a former lawyer and self-proclaimed “prick in a Porsche” is dying of cancer, nearing the end. Having recently abandoned his wife and daughter, he is on the run from his family and from his own impeding death. Owen, the owner and bartender of Damascus, an aging alcoholic with a hideous birthmark on his upper-lip (that reminds everyone of Hitler) is full of unbridled self-loathing. The only person who can get through Owen’s icy demeanor is his lesbian poet niece, Daphne, who works as an English tutor, and who is also an amazingly kind and genuine human being.

Nothing ever changes at Damascus until No Eyebrows walks in. He and Shambles begin a reluctant relationship after she jerks him off in the bathroom, and allows him to touch her shoulder, which leads somewhere unexpected.

“Every interchange was a con. Every night, a pitiful costume party. Except here was No Eyebrows blowing the whole cycle of charades for everyone. Here he was having the audacity to be heartfelt, and what was Shambles supposed to do with someone showing honesty?”

Around the same time, Owen begins donning a Santa Claus suit (beard, hat and all) after a small girl shouts that he looks like Hitler on the street. Sick of the comparison, Owen covers the birthmark with his beard, and develops a new persona for himself. Owen decides to embody Santa Claus, being kind and generous, which ultimately backfires when he takes in Byron Settles, a former Marine, now a drunk, for a week. Owen just happens to take in Byron a few days before Daphne’s best friend Syl, an up-and-coming artist, is about to unveil her newest collection at Damascus: A controversial collection called The Olfactory Installation which employs portraits of soldiers who have died in The War on Terror, in an effort to coerce those safe at home to remember the men and woman who died for them.

I’m not going to give it all away, but the depth and transformation of these characters when all the cards are on the table, when all Hell breaks loose, is like an emotional kick in the chest. This exquisitely transgressive story takes an unpredictable turn when these characters are placed in certain situations where they are given the choice to do the right or the wrong thing. And this is exactly what makes Damascus such a powerful novel – Mohr manages to craft characters that are despicable at first but as they grow, the reader grows, and we then find ourselves cheering them on in the face of adversity, themselves, love, life, reality, and death.

“Then [No Eyebrows] said, ‘Please hug me one more time,’ and so [Shambles] did and during this final embrace he remembered their first hug, how much healing he’d felt that night in Damascus’s bathroom. It didn’t even matter if the healing wasn’t real, if it had been like a sleazy minister tricking his congregation into believing.”

And that is the message I’ll leave you with. Those seedy people that lurk in the shadows of bars that we talked about earlier; those people that are probably hiding from something. You may be one of them. I may be too, but I’ll never tell. Damascus is about those people, as they search for a way to heal themselves after realizing that nobody is going to do it for them.

*

Tyler Grimm is a novelist, screenwriter, and short fiction writer, currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing through Wilkes University. He is a contributing writer for Celebrate Gettysburg Magazine, and has recently begun reviewing fiction for PANK Magazine. He was a judging reader for the James Jones Fellowship Award in 2011, and has recently begun the process of starting a local writing workshop near him. His short film, Asthenia, is in the early stages of production. He has been working on his first novel, tentatively entitled Closer Than They Appear. Tyler lives in suburban Pennsylvania with his girlfriend and his dachshund.

San Francisco Bay Press

$14.99

Meg Tuite’s “Domestic Apparition” is sublime.

In this mosaic of tightly intertwined chapters that seamlessly join to form the novel, we meet Michelle, our narrator, whom we will not just come to root for, but to deeply care about in all her imperfections.

The novel is set deep in the human interior, and there we meet Michelle at age six and in reflected snippets, we travel with her the distance from her dark childhood in a seemingly normal family, through her hampered yet wild adolescence and into her early adulthood where in the midst of the soul-numbing crush of corporate America, an intimate human connection is finally made.  We stay with Michelle while she learns to feel, to attach, to grieve.  We watch her become human and it is tremendous to see – to feel — this adult hatchling come into her own and enter the world.

Along the way, Michelle shows us life from inside her tragic, sprawling, Catholic family while maintaining enough taut emotional distance to keep from becoming maudlin.    We see her survive the abusive nuns at school, her raging father, and the misery of watching her mother disintegrate – while all the while she’s instructing us in the meticulous defenses people craft in order to survive.  We meet a menagerie of relatives, friends, and colleagues – people coping with loss, rebelling against mistreatment, pushed to the margins by an uncaring world.  Michelle is a realistic interpreter who does a majestic job of exploring the truths barnacled to the harsh underside of family life.

Tuite never allows Michelle to become precious or sentimental and renders Michelle’s life in painstakingly clear detail – replete with every horror.  Tuite offers her readers the “static eye” which (she reminds us)  truth requires “at the very least.”  Sentences like this gem fill the novel:

“Every night my grandmother limps out of the liquor store with the submissive stoop of the genuflected and the promise of a liturgy to come in a bottle.” You will be transported by the glorious imagery on every page.   How’s this for description?  “His fabricated face, pliable in its chilling meteorological leaps and depths, ravaged over his features like a typhoon blasting through a village built on sticks.”

Michelle and her siblings emerge from the darkness of their childhoods with more than their fair share of psychic wounds. Yet in rendering her characters’ vulnerabilities — and invulnerabilities — Tuite touches our own humanity.   The gift of Tuite’s searing prose leads us to want for Michelle and her family as they wrangle with themselves and the world.   Neither Michelle nor Tuite flinch – darkness is made visible on the page.

The work is bursting with pain, with raucousness, with joy and, ultimately, heart.   Michelle’s life pushes us all to feel our own truths, no matter how grim or painful they are.   She reminds us that facing our own history and who we are as a result of it is the only way to be whole in this world, to be able to feel the deepest of joys, to not be hobbled by our own selves.

“Domestic Apparition” is stalwart.  It transcends brave.  It shreds you and then replenishes you — much as the world will.  We are reminded of the impeccable Oscar Wilde quote:  “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Meg Tuite takes us to the gutter with all its grime and then gently tilts our eyes to the skies.  In her capable hands, we will indeed see the stars.

*

~Anna March is a writer from DC who now makes Rehoboth Beach, DE her home.  Her work has appeared in Salon, Connotation Press and other publications.  Her novel, “The Diary of Suzanne Frank”, is forthcoming.  She can be reached at wordsgirl@yahoo.com.~

SoHo Press

$16/432 pages

It seems fitting that Alex Shakar would open his novel, Luminarium, with an invitation.  Not your garden variety party invitation, mind you.  Something a bit more oblique, less straightforward.  But an invitation nonetheless.

Picture yourself stepping into a small, cuboid room. In the center squats an old recliner, upholstered in black vinyl. To the chair’s back is affixed a jointed metal arm, possibly on loan from a desk lamp. At the end of the arm, where the bulb and shade would have gone, hangs instead a sparkly gold motorcycle helmet, a vintage, visorless number with a chin strap.

It’s an appeal to step fully into the shoes of one Fred Brounian, a down-on-his-luck loser and ex-CEO who lives with his parents in a limbo of depression and unemployment.  Fred has lost his company, his job, fiancé, and now stands to lose his twin brother, George, who is comatose and in the final stages of terminal cancer.  Having lost all else, caring for George occupies most of Fred’s time and finances, leaving him both destitute and desperate.

To amend his pecuniary situation, Fred decides to participate in an experiment in which his brain will be electronically manipulated to reproduce sensations associated with states of religious ecstasy.  It is at this vulnerable moment that we join Fred—or, perhaps it is more correct to say we are joined to Fred—and it is this initial experiment and its mind-expanding aftereffects that propels the ensuing narrative and palls the novel with a surreal haze.

Which brings us back to that second-person opening, our invitation.  For what follows is a shift firmly into Fred’s point-of-view and an exploration of our nation’s own post-9/11 identity crisis and the increasingly blurry lines between the real and the virtual, religion and science, our flesh-and-blood selves and the electronic avatars we project into the aether. It was smart of Shakar to firmly anchor the reader to flesh and bone when the novel’s themes are so prone to drift into abstraction.

Indeed, the story is at its best when these themes bubble up organically through action and dialog.  For example, this scene where Fred, still feeling the lingering aftershocks of a recent experiment and flush with confidence at the prospect of getting a job, develops an impromptu alter-ego:

He thought he’d said Fred. Or that’s what he’d meant to say. Or maybe he’d meant, Oh, call me Fred. He was already nodding before he processed that final o. Beyond humiliated, pretty much giving up at that point, he just kept nodding, resigned to the secretary calling him by a name that could have belonged to some hobbit mob henchman.

“OK,” she said, to his wonderment, without apparent sarcasm, “Freddo.” Coming from her slyly smiling lips, the name sounded almost rakish.

“And you are?” he said. Freddo said.

“Christine.”

“Christine.” Freddo drew out the last syllable, like he didn’t want it to end.

The exchange speaks to the mercurial nature of identity, the slipperiness of personality, how difficult it is to ever pin someone down to one set of characteristics.  Even when that someone is you.

And, as the novel progresses, Fred finds the people around him ever-shifting, transmuting from the familiar to inversions or permutations of their former selves.  His brother George is sending him mysterious messages and appears to be sabotaging their former company even as he lies comatose in the hospital.  Meanwhile, his younger brother, the workaholic Sam, has transformed their former company from an idealistic virtual reality paradise called Urth to a military and emergency training environment and who seems to be setting Fred up for failure and humiliation.  To complicate matters, Fred’s love interest turns out to be hiding something he never anticipated.

Each of these story lines is interesting in its own way and it’s a credit to Shakar that he develops characters that are capable of surprising us (and Fred) in ways that are not initially obvious but entirely sensible in hindsight. This parade of morphing personalities brings to mind this passage from Roger Ebert’s 2003 review of Tarkovsky’s Solaris:

When we love someone, who do we love? That person, or our idea of that person? …Although other persons no doubt exist in independent physical space, our entire relationship with them exists in our minds. When we touch them, it is not the touch we experience, but our consciousness of the touch.

These questions of duality and our own frustrated attempts to drill down to the core of reality are suggested throughout the narrative.  Which brings me to my few disappointments with the novel.  Namely that Shakar can be a bit heavy-handed and tends to beat one over head with his motifs: in this novel alone we have twins, science and religion, magic/illusion, reality and virtual reality, twin towers, the two sides of the human brain, etc…  A little of this stuff can go a long way and after a while I wanted to raise the white flag and say: “Okay!  I get it already.”

Worse, however, is Shakar’s tendency to ply us with long lists of questions and saggy interior monologues in lieu of action or image.  This predilection leads to plenty sloggy passages like this:

…he’d been reading about the anthropic cosmological principle, how the universe was so finely tuned for life as to arouse suspicion: how, if there had been four extended dimensions instead of three, planets would have flown right into their suns; how, if the cosmic expansion rate were one part in a million billion less, the universe would have remained a sweltering 3,000º Celsius and collapsed back in on itself billions of years ago; how the chance of such cosmological constants having emerged at random was something on the order of every member of his high school class winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning in alphabetical order. If some greater force and purpose were at work in all this, he wondered, then why all the subterfuge? Why all the arbitrariness of quantum fluctuation and genetic mutation? Why the absurdity of brains that could simulate some sense of that greater life only when they misfired? What good was a truth that could be perceived only through delusion? How would one ever really know what the truth was, in such a system? How would one ever know from one moment to the next the right thing to do, the right way to go?

Did you get through all that?  Not only is this section tedious, but it also leaves the reader feeling as though he is being led by the nose.  And further, these are questions that are raised with greater economy elsewhere via action and metaphor.

Still, despite these faults, I found Luminarium to be a smart and moving read.  On one hand a ghost story and meditation on post-9/11 grief.  On the other, a paen to the bonds of family and the ties that bind all of humanity.  The way we all move to the future while looking ever back to our past.

*

~Randy Brzoska is a graduate of the Wilkes University Creative Writing program and spends his time at home endlessly finishing his first novel, reading, and hoarding goonch catfish.  (He also currently teaches at King’s College and adores his wife and son.)~

Chomu Press

$17/408 pages

‘Jeanette, is something the matter?’ In Joe Simpson Walker’s novel, people have a habit of asking Jeanette Hesketh ‘What’s the matter?’ Her parents, her teacher, her neighbours, her is-he-isn’t-he boyfriend – they all want to get to the bottom of what is Jeanette’s problem. Even Jeanette, messed up and confused, wrestles with her internal dualistic schism; is she a good or immoral girl? The reader, or to be specific, this reader also wondered aloud – what is the problem with Jeanette? Why did I struggle with her so?

By rights, it’s a book I should have taken to my heart. A diverse mix of characters live in her world, secrets and fetishes are buried below the fake veneer of suburban 50s / early 60s Britain. Illicit sex, foot fetishes, leathers, gags, whips, breaking and entering, transvestite dad, alternative manifestos, erotica and the underworld. With subjects like these, you’d expect the book to earn some level of cult status. The tale is told predominantly through Jeanette’s first-person perspective, alternating into the omniscient third person to peel back and reveal more of the other figures in her life. The opening sets a vivid scene:

With my neck gripped in the crook of his elbow he dragged me backwards into the house. I tried to struggle but was pulled off my balance and only his hold kept me from falling. We were in the kitchen. He swung me forwards and bent me over the table, and caught my right arm and twisted it behind me.

The assailant is Mark Child, a twenty-one year old neighbour. With his leathers, motorbike and rage against the world, he’s a veritable wild one. Jeanette’s relationship with Mark is the novel’s ballast that most events stem from. We later learn that Jeanette set up her own faux-abduction in an attempt to stop her father’s night-time liaisons when she is Valerie. Jeanette is under Child’s influence, but this dynamic shifts as the novel progresses and you get the sense that he needs her just as much as she is led by him.The novel paces along impressively with a decent share of sharp twists and turns but is often let down by Jeanette’s voice, which can be indistinct from other characters’ or just not that believable. In the beginning, I struggled with her deferential use of ‘Miss’ when talking to her teacher Sarah Thaine. This is supposed to underline that Jeanette is a school-age kid and denote the historical context where teachers were held in higher regard, but it never rang quite true. By the end of the novel, I was more accepting of it, but initially it really grated. It was a shame because I still feel there was a real opportunity to make Jeanette one of fiction’s more memorable central characters.

The novel is prefaced with the disclaimer This story takes place in the past.  People thought and acted differently then. The implied meaning being that this book contains some outmoded perceptions and prejudices. Whilst these viewpoints aren’t exactly rampant, there are enough references to Jim’s “condition” that jar and the author missed a real opportunity to explore the difficulties Jim/Valerie faced with greater depth and nuance. What was it like to be a transvestite in 50s Britain with a wife and child? Instead I found myself sorting out rehashed, clichéd misconceptions and wearied prejudices from the characterisation. Yes, we know it was a different time, but this isn’t an excuse to dust down worn rhetoric from fifty-odd years ago and put them back into print. Some real value and serious weight could have been added simply be telling the story of being a transvestite dad in 50s Britain. The use of language becomes lazy and reverts to stereotype; Valerie purrs, Jim simply says.

Subtlety isn’t the book’s strength. The author would do better to tell us less and reveal more. The thing is, throughout the book there is plenty of intrigue but the reader isn’t allowed to build up a sense of anticipation. The revealing is done clumsily and overtly:

In hindsight, Jeanette had been acting strangely for some time before “the incident.”

Why tell us about an “incident” upfront? Why not drop in some more subtle pointers? This approach reminded me of a poor soap opera’s script, heavy handed and MAKING SURE THE READER UNDERSTANDS. Where there was an opportunity for the author to make up some lost ground and paint a decent back-drop, it felt lazy and unoriginal. Consider:

Child had a political message. He’d told me about it. There were international gangs of Jews who controlled all the money in the world and told governments what they could and couldn’t do. At the same time they were secretly backing Communism, which weakened free peoples’ will power and sense of right and wrong everywhere; I didn’t exactly follow why, but that suited their plans. Jews and Reds were both equally bad and impossible to trust. We needed a new young leader who could destroy them. That’s what Child said.

Come on, really? Is that the best conspiracy we could come up with – Commies and Jews? I never really believed in Mark Child, nor what he was rallying against. Although Jeanette had her flaws I finished the novel and she still resonated somewhere within me. Mark and his manifestos were second-rate, poorly fleshed-out and bordering on parody. As a result, when the author introduces a variety of fetishes to the reader I began to suspect I was reading a corrupt Enid Blyton novel;  perhaps Five Get Bound and Gagged Again or Seven’s Secret Punishment.   Stepping back, there is a lot in Jeanette that, in theory, should make it a novel worth reading. Unfortunately, it is poorly executed which is a shame because I believe she deserved better.

*

~Martin Macaulay lives, writes and works in Scotland~

Patasola Press

$14

Remember the last time you woke up after a one-night stand and chewed your own arm off so you could sneak out without waking the semi-stranger sleeping next to you? No? What do you mean, that’s never happened to you?

In the surreal world of the stories found in Rae Bryant’s The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, such an act is not only regarded as plausible, but somewhat logical, as well:

“She tied off the left sleeve of her coat, moved out of the apartment and into the hallway, missing the forearm already but resolved to leaving it… A single forearm was well-worth the escape.”

This story, “Intolerable Impositions,” is one of the best in the collection and really highlights Bryant’s powerful and often poetic prose. It’s a concise tale of a woman who is afraid that her life could become consumed by caring for a cyst on the neck of the man she slept with the night before—so afraid that she gnaws off her own arm. She’s determined and headstrong, like most of the women in Bryant’s stories, and her decision making process—which includes ideas such as leaving a fake phone number and spending the rest of her life with the man—is both comical and gloomy.

And I find that these combined feelings meet me in several of the collection’s stories. The bizarre story “Collecting Calliope,” for example, describes a sort of brothel in which men come to fornicate with life-like dolls. One of the dolls, Calliope, can be taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle for the customer’s pleasure. I laughed at these lines about a bachelor party enjoying the doll before I realized how disturbing they really are:

“Just last week, we had a bachelor party who delighted in her disjointed features. It took us three days to put poor Calliope back together, but the men paid a divine rate for their pleasures.”

The collection is divided into three parts. Nestled between parts one and three—aptly named “Stories” and “More Stories”—is the section titled “Klimt Redux: A Study in Desecration.” Here Bryant uses eleven sketches from the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt as a canvas for her words. I am not going to try to seriously critique the visual art—I would be out of my element—but I will say that I enjoyed “Klimt Redux” and found it refreshing; it made me wonder why more writers don’t include some sort of visual element in their work.  

There are strong post-feminist themes among the “Desecrations” (as there are throughout the rest of Bryant’s work). In some of the pieces, Bryant even appears to be mocking Klimt’s sketches, which generally depict nude women, sometimes in erotic positions.

One of the standout stories is “Cow Tipping.” It’s about a group of guys playing their weekly poker game in one of the friends’ “Man Cave.” It’s there that the men rebel against their apparently oppressive wives—with playing cards with naked women on them, Jack Daniel’s, and by sharing the details of an affair. The conflict of the story appears when one of the men suggests inviting a new guy to their next poker game. The potential newcomer is black, and that puts at least one of the men on edge. The tension of the story is palpable. Secrecy fills the space between the characters, and it is clear that their time in the “Man Cave” is a closely guarded ritual:

“The men sit in silence knowing that no one truly intends to invite Jarod. Not Fred or Sam or Jim or Alan. It’s an exercise, a social narrative they’ve fallen into since the three of them got their asses kicked by the all black city defensive line for one’s lust for a black cheerleader. And besides, asking a stranger into their game was like asking a girl into their secret club house.”

The results of their “social narrative” reveal just how fragile these men are, as well as fragility of their lifestyle. Parts of this story made me feel uncomfortable, as if I were stuck in the middle of an awkward argument.

I certainly can’t say that each story is exciting or riveting, but each one will have a strong impact on readers. This is the kind of book in which each word carries weight and each one seems to have been chosen carefully. You could read the whole book in a single sitting, but I wouldn’t suggest it. These stories surely benefit from a little bit of time to simmer in the reader’s mind.

*

~Thomas Michael Duncan lives, writes, and works in central New York. Visit him at tmdwrites.tumblr.com.~

The Green Lantern Press

$20

The Mutation of Fortune is not an easy book to get a fix on.  The stories are too fluid to be easily grasped for quick summary.  The ground beneath the reader’s feet shifts too rapidly for simple categorization and analysis.  In short, the only description of the collection that really does justice is the full text itself.  Anything less comes up short.

However, that should not be interpreted to mean that these stories are not coherent.  I found the stories delightful.  I was often puzzled as I read, but that puzzlement was mixed with wonder.  Sometimes it is good to be puzzled.

In the very first story in the collection, “The Girl Without,” “[a]fter [the narrator’s] Father removed [the narrator’s] hands, he replaced them with metal.  Proud of his ingenuity, he boasted, These hands are of more value than before!”  However, the metal hands “were not endowments,” but rather “became shapeless lumps, flattening and denting at every move.”  When the narrator shows the father what has happened to the narrator’s hands, the father calls him clumsy, “nothing better than a hen, always picking at the dirt” and casts the narrator out.

In another story, “Soliloquy,” the narrator, who is apparently the same narrator as in “The Girl Without,” receives “a rat as a present from [the narrator’s] aunt who believes that everyone should care for something besides oneself.”  “The rat has a tendency to get on its hind legs and appear as though it is addressing” the narrator.  When this occurs, the narrator imagines “a soliloquy for the rat, performed in a high-pitched voice.”  Hearing the rat making noises in the night, the narrator turns “on the lights.  The rat is standing in the middle of its cage.  Its paws are on its face.”  The narrator watches “as, like a mask, it removes its own rat-face.  Underneath” the narrator sees the narrator’s “own.”

Though the narrator feels the same in these two stories as I read, it also doesn’t seem possible.  The narrator with the metal hands whose father berates and casts out the narrator when the metal hands turn out to not be as wonderful as once imagined cannot possibly be the same narrator who sees a rat take off its face to reveal the narrator’s face.  Yet, at the same time, these narrators seem the same.  Something has morphed between these two stories, something that seems to change the destiny that surrounds the narrator but leaves the narrator somehow unchanged.

In yet another story, “The Well,” in a “courtyard there is a well where [the narrator drops] things [the narrator] is no longer interested in keeping.”  Also, the narrator has a stamp “collection organized by animals and their degree of ferocity.”  When the narrator is not around, the narrator’s brother keeps rearranging the stamps alphabetically because the brother says that the “most superior arrangement is alphabetically.”  Despite being told “many times that if he does not stop reorganizing [the narrator’s] stamp collection [the narrator] will throw him into the well, he continues to alphabetize the stamps.  As promised, the narrator throws the brother into the well.  However, when the narrator wakes “in the morning all the things [the narrator has] thrown in the well are on the ground in the courtyard.”  “These things are in piles, including [the] brother, who has placed himself next to a basket, a balloon, and a book.”

Again, this third narrator somehow mirrors the two mentioned above, and yet is not the same.  Though the stories seem to parallel each other in some ways, there are distortions in the reflections that each cast on and absorb from each other.  As I continued to read, this somehow made me feel that I was continually progressing at the same time that my method of transport as well as my destination changed in subtle, or sometimes not so subtle, ways.

However, even though I could not trust that any footing that I managed to find would not evaporate a few words later, I did not feel lost.  As the world beneath the words altered, the narrator’s voice remained consistent and felt like a guide that I could follow.  While there was something in the tone or perhaps in the continuous mutations themselves that instilled in me undeniable sensations of ever-present danger and urgency, the voice of the narrator soothed me and promised marvels. I found this constant push and pull enchanting.

I greatly enjoyed reading The Mutation of Fortune.  The stories are imaginative, delightful, and definitely unusual.  Adams has found a way, in my humble opinion, to do something different without losing coherency.  There is a simplicity to the confusion that I found particularly endearing.  I sincerely hope that this book is more widely distributed than the initial edition of 500 copies, as I’m certain that a much greater number of people would love to read this book.

*

~David S. Atkinson is a Nebraska-born writer currently living in Denver.  He holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska.  His stories have appeared in (and/or are soon to be appearing in) “Gray Sparrow,” “Children Churches and Daddies,” “Split Quarterly,” “Cannoli Pie,” “C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag,” “Brave Blue Mice,” and “Fine Lines.”  His book reviews have appeared in “Gently Read Literature,” “The Rumpus,” and “All Things Pankish.”  The web site dedicated to his writing can be found at http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/.  He currently serves as a reader for “Gray Sparrow” and in his non-literary time he works as a patent attorney in Denver.~

Unbridled Books

272 pages, $24.95

Lies have a way of revealing truth. Motives. Fears. Obsessions. And aren’t writers the most fabulous liars? Great fiction is, in a sense, a series of fantastical lies spun into a gold-threaded web that somehow ensnares your heart with its truth, like the stardust inside all of us drawing our heads skyward, propelling us to fashion myths, to make up makers.

The Coffins of Little Hope is a book preoccupied with deception, half-truths, myths. A bone-lonely and vaguely deranged woman, Daisy, reports that her young daughter, Lenore, is missing, while the entire country is in a tizzy over the impending finale of a series of infamous YA novels, the Miranda-and-Desiree books, which seem to be a delightfully morbid blend of Harry Potter and Lemony Snickett.

Schaffert created the perfect narrator for this tale—Essie, or S Myles according to her byline, the octogenarian obituary writer for her family’s small town newspaper. Essie may be one of the most expertly rendered characters I’ve ever read. Tart, feisty, curious, unsentimental yet loving. I cannot imagine traveling through this tale with another guide. Essie knows pretty much everyone in the area, and peppers the story with her “greatest hits,” her most fondly-remembered obituaries. Her grandson, the lovably silly and earnest Doc, runs the paper, a somewhat unwilling inheritor, after his parents died in a car crash. The family’s dynamic is fascinating, and in a way, grounds the other more fanciful aspects of this novel into a heart-centered reality. Doc’s sister, Ivy, abruptly returns after several years, to claim her now-teenage daughter, Tiff, who she abandoned to follow her lover/professor to Paris, and who has spent all this time with Doc. Doc and Tiff have a strong, bittersweet bond that brought me close to tears more than once. Essie’s family is simultaneously dysfunctional and close-knit, as many families are.

Daisy, on the other hand, taps into modern humanity’s more morbid traits—fascination with missing and/or dead children, fascination with a woman publicly unraveling, fascination with possible hoaxes, considering that Lenore may or may not have existed at all. Daisy is another expertly rendered character, all feather –light and wilting, sequestered in the Crippled Eighty, the farm she inherited from her father, the farm she allegedly raised Lenore, the possible child, the possible victim, possibly stricken by hypergraphia, writing cramped little lines in notebooks Daisy claimed to have burned to hide her daughter’s madness. Doc and Essie’s little newspaper becomes a beacon of light, where readers from all over flock to get the latest news of mad, mad Daisy and her possibly imaginary Lenore. Not to mention, the newspaper is one of a handful of small presses that are clandestinely printing the final Miranda-and-Desiree novel, aptly titled The Coffins of Little Hope.

The writer of this series appears throughout the novel too. His name is Muscatine, and he had me at hello. I adored his eccentricities and his classic melancholia. His fucked up relationship with his daughter, and his hurried letters rendered in shorthand to our narrator, Essie, who writes back, with whiffs of longing, keeping her pen-pal a secret, a last romance, as it were. This novel purrs with at least a dozen characters, but Schaffert’s deceptively simplistic, charmingly sharp writing keeps them all fresh and unique. I only wish there were more of each, particularly more of the local minister’s wife, Abby Most, who has a few striking scenes, but it just wasn’t enough for me.

One of the things I enjoyed most about this novel was the vignette-style of each chapter. Some of them could almost have been stand-alone short stories, but there was a gossamer-light but undeniably present thread running through them all. There was a master narrative at work throughout it, even if the chapter’s content veered off-center. Another thing I loved about this novel was the way Schaffert brought to bear the lovely tragedy of our brief lives and the gravity of passing time. During one particularly evocative chapter, Essie visits her sister, Lydia, in a nearby nursing home on Thanksgiving. Lydia is steadily deteriorating, bested by Alzheimer’s, in and out like a partially unscrewed light bulb.

She put her hand on my wrist. “I’d fix you something before you go, but I always fall asleep in the kitchen.”

“No,” I said, “you always fall asleep in the car, not in the kitchen.”

“Well,” she said, sighing again, returning her gaze to the TV. “I guess you’d be the only one who’d know.”

It was getting dark even earlier than I’d expected it to. “I need to get home, love,” I said. “I promised the kids.”

“The kids,” she said, sneering. “When you’re a kid, they tell you, Better enjoy it now.”

“And we did, Lydia,” I said. “We really did. We had a hell of a time.” I stood, kissed her cheek, and wished her a good night.

There is much more to this enchanting novel than I’ve let on, so please, go buy a copy. Float down Schaffert’s rabbit hole. Settle into a room in this small town’s B&B, the one where Muscatine ends up, scribbling. Take a walk down the path to the Crippled Eighty, and be sure to pilfer a couple low-hanging peaches on the way. Come on. I dare you.

*

Dawn West (b. 1987) reads, writes, and eats falafel in Ohio.