Lazy Fascist Press

$10.95

After reading Sex dungeon for sale, Patrick Wensink’s debut story collection that came out in Eraserhead Press’ New Bizarro Author Series I decided he could (and should) write a very good novel if he would just be slightly less all over the place. And in Black Hole Blues, he is. Slightly.

In his first novel, Wensink manages to stick to a reasonably straightforward but very lively narrative style. That is, if you think letting a rusty old tour bus, a decomposing club sandwich or an old guitar tell their side of the story is straightforward.

The story of Black Hole Blues is one hundred percent bizarro. The main protagonist is washout country musician J. Claude Caruthers, or, as he likes to call himself ‘Nashville’s Shakespeare’. Once successful, J. Claude has become entangled in feuds with country star Kenny Rogers and über-annoying gay singer Denny Dynasty. But worst of all, he’s set himself the impossible task of writing a song for every woman’s name there is and gotten stuck on the last one, Zygmut. Which also happens to be the name of his disappeared sister.
While J. Claude withers in the back lounge of his tour bus, surviving on a diet of club sandwiches and overused one-liners, his estranged twin brother Lloyd, a successful quantum scientist, messes up in his Swiss laboratory and accidentally creates – hey, it’s a Patrick Wensink book – a black hole that starts hungrily eating the world, beginning with his girlfriend.

While more and more of the earth is turned to antimatter, mysterious forces drive all the protagonists towards the derelict Caruthers family house where they hope to finally unravel the secrets they have been living with their entire lives. And make the ultimate club sandwich, off course.

No one with a functioning cardiovascular system can read this book without laughing at least twice per page. Wensink writes the sort of deadpan comedy that at times makes you stop caring about what happens story wise, as long as the jokes keep coming. Maybe it’s the country music link, but in this respect Black Hole Blues reminded me of those Kinky Friedman murder mysteries you just want to read over and over again. Wensink’s style is very visual, sometimes even poetic. When there’s a party ‘snacks and booze and music’ fill ‘every crevice of the space’. Grotesque metaphor is also one of Wensink’s strong points. Things never just bother someone in this book. No, they ‘chomp away’ at ‘the pie-eating contest of [their] soul’. I enjoy that, because I just love a writer that loves his words.

I also love all of the characters in this book and you can tell Wensink loves them too. Fallible and human as they are, the author portrays all their weaknesses in such a funny and caring way that they stay with you for long after you finish the book.

But, however entertaining, there’s more to a novel than lovable characters, hilarious one liners and weird science. Eventually, somewhere near the end of it, an author will have to find a way to tie it all together in a more or less meaningful way. And when a time machine needs to be built, a black hole needs to be stopped and the truth about childhood mysteries needs to be figured out, all before the world collapses into an overcooked casserole of unhinged neutrons and protons, zippy dialogue and having a chapter told from the perspective of a rusty old meat smoker just don’t cut it.

As a consequence, in the final chapters of Black Hole Blues, there is not enough suspense. In fact, it is often quite hard to tell what exactly is going on. With the psychology, and even the identity, of the characters becoming more and more tangled, we need a clearer view of what is happening inside those heads than Wensink can give us. In order to feel the fear and anxiety of the characters, to have a sense of urgency, the reader needs to be reminded over and over what the stakes are. This, and therefore the motivation of the characters, is too vague. For his next novel, Wensink has some work to do here. That, however, does not detract from the hilariousness of the preceding chapters.

So, is Patrick Wensink the next big thing in bizarro fiction?  All things considered, I’d say he’s about 85% there.

~P. Jonas Bekker is a writer and a poet from the Netherlands.~

Mud Luscious Press

Despite what you may have heard, Darby Larson is a lyricist. He might be the Eminem of prose fiction, but probably not. Perhaps he’s more like Sage Francis or one of the guys from Definitive Jux, but my guess is no. Hip-hop comparisons aside, Larson’s got some skills where putting words together is concerned. He’s definitely an artist who adeptly uses literary devices such as assonance, alliteration, wordplay and a little Derridean “difference/différance”.

So then what about The Iguana Complex? It’s, in a word, fantastic!

This little book (it’s just 46 pages) is the first Nephew imprint of Mud Luscious Press. Within the first couple pages, we are introduced to main characters, Cassandra and Smith who’s name is not actually Smith, but Freeman. We are initially led to believe that we are reading a play, or at least the description of a play or even, perhaps, a recounting of a play:

The crowd sobers when the loss of their leader is lost from the strange of the onstage.

But Larson does his best to keep his readers guessing the entire time at just what exactly he or she is really reading—is it a poem? a play? a dreamscape? a musizoological study? none and/or all of the above simultaneously and more?

…A Dreamer? Freeman sluicing the shuddering of the subject of this subject, this subsubject, this subthought and now center of his mind like a Dreamer? Freeman sluicing the shuddering of the subject of this subject, this subsubject, this subthought of his thought sluicing the shuddering of the subject of this subject… of his subthought of his subthought of his subthought of his.

Many paragraphs also literally fade in and out. Words dissolve and reappear; the paragraphs themselves fragment. Larson’s prose builds into a rhythm and then fades from black to gray to white. He sucks you into the flow of his words just long enough that when the sentences begin to fade, your brain automatically wants to fill in the gaps, which, speaking of, there is a liberal use of white space peppered in throughout the book. The actual structure and layout are yet another element of the narrative and another swatch in Larson’s creative palette.Font sizes also vary. Paragraphs turn into singsong strings of dialog and the text feels like it’s breathing, like it’s alive.

It beguttons the buttoning of alarms or the on of the radio. Somewhere pianoish, Rachmaninoffish. Awake. A little chilly… The crowd’s on their endingly feet singing neverendingly songs over and over, the song Cassandra beguttoned a day or so ago.

To me it’s very clear that Larson is having a fantastic time and, as a result, the reader will have a fantastic time as well. Like death and taxes, having fun reading The Iguana Complex is inevitable.

This is the part of my review where I contemplated telling readers that the complex story is so great that I don’t want to spoil anything with a detailed plot synopsis, but that’d only be partially true. I’ve read the book three times and I’m of the mind that the plot ostensibly defies synopsis. Most of the time, The Iguana Complex reads like a narrative that’s been fractured and reassembled into a series of meta-thoughts and -scenes. And that, in this case, is a good thing.

Friends and colleagues who have heard me raving about this book have, of course, asked me if they should read it too—and to them I say emphatically: yes! The best part is that Nephew editions are no longer only in max print runs of 150. The original limited supply of copies gave me an idea: i.e. Nephew readers could go all grassroots with this book! I envisioned a reader-loan program. It’d have been like back in the day when, in order to read, people shared books and magazines because they were often to poor to buy them on their own—because reading was basically a luxury—but by sharing, it also fostered a sort of literary community, an idea I’m totally into!

I’d even talked to Mud Luscious- and Nephew’s man-with-the-plan, J. A. Tyler (A Man of Glass and All the Ways We Have Failed, The Zoo, Inconceivable Wilson) about my idea and he was totally on board too.

However, in the end, the 150-book limited printing run game plan was tossed out and we’re all probably better off for it. Though I submit, this shouldn’t deter any of you from sharing these books. Word of mouth is still a pretty fantastic way to get people to read great writing, especially if you are excited about it! We should, I think, strive to have all of our books look like they were carried around in Huck Finn’s pocket for a week.

Okay, soapbox spiel over. This book is great and the second Nephew print, Meat Is All, looks pretty great too! Don’t sleep on these titles!

Here’s air things getting strickey.

Liszten.

**[Yes, the last 2 lines are spelled that way in the 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.~~

Melville House Press

208 pgs, $11.95

Having been born in the middle seventies to parents who owned a VW Beetle, I admit to being confused when I first picked up How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by Christopher Boucher.  I immediately thought of the virtual bible of Volkswagens by John Muir (first published in ’69 and still surviving today in a 19^th edition).  Admittedly,  I never read Muir’s book, but anyone related to a Beetle aficionado at that time could not help but have formed a sense of it: counterculture in car manual form, the individual and his/her Volkswagen alone together on the open road, and so on.

Clearly, Boucher has similar remembrances, though other than certain emotional impressions and a hazy reflection of certain frameworks Boucher’s book is something else entirely. For example, I certainly wouldn’t recommend using it to actually attempt to fix a Volkswagen.  Instead, evoking just enough of the old Muir book as a vehicle to kindle reminiscence, this novel revs with the heartwarming story of a man struggling through life while dealing with the death of his father and trying to raise his son.

Of course, this is not as straighforward as it seems.  For example, his son is “a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle.”  When his son turns two, the narrator holds a party and orders “food from Nini’s (detective stories for the Beetle, pizza for everyone else).”  When the “pizza/stories took longer to arrive than” the narrator expected, “the kids started playing a game—Red Rover…with pieces of cake as the reward.  And the VW kept winning, because of his size.”  The narrator sees his son “pointing his finger in his friend Ted’s face and singing the Queen song ‘We Are the Champions.’  Then the Volkswagen ran over to the picnic table and shoveled half a cake into his mouth.”

Also, the narrator’s father dies because he is assaulted

“by a Heart Attack Tree while sitting at [their] corner table at Atkins Farm in Amherst, Massachusetts (at least that’s where the farm was parked as long as anyone could remember).”  “Before” the narrator’s father “could move or do anything,…the Tree attacked—slamming his fist through the glass and into” the narrator’s “father’s chest and pulling all of the stories out of his heart.”

And then, with the narrator’s “father’s body still stuck to his hand, the Tree trudged through the broken glass, into the store, behind the counter and into the kitchen.  He shifted the farm into first geat and drove it away.”

Obviously, there is serious imagining going on in this book.  After all, did you know that “many Volkswagens won’t allow strangers to even touch them[?]”  That “[t]hey’ll attack for almost any reason, even if they know a person is only trying to help or repair them[?]”  I didn’t, but I do now.

Strange imagination isn’t the only fun to be had in this book either.  Words in the prose are shifted in interesting ways.  Think of the phrase ‘time is money.’  Imagine the two literally switched, such as when the narrator looks “deep into [his] wallet” and sees “four hours balled up in the corner.”  Objects are sometimes living things.  Ever try to fix something with a tool that seems to have a will of it’s own?  Try having a racket that is “overly chatty all afternoon—telling [you] about its wife, its kids, a few scrapes with the law” and then starts “to weep uncontrollably[,]” leaving you nothing to do but take “him in to a therapist.”  In short, Christopher Boucher’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is full of all kinds of crazy fun.

Now, crazy fun is all well and good.  However, some writing that goes in for that sort of thing sacrifices story.  I’ve seen books that rest their ultimate success on their strange portions, not worrying about whether the story works or not.  In other words, it just doesn’t seem to be that important.  Here, on the other hand, nothing could be further from the truth.  Toasters may do stripteases, fish may be mechanics, faith may be love (wink wink), but Boucher doesn’t cut corners and simply hope nobody pays any attention to the man behind the curtain.  To the contrary, the story is enhanced by the strangeness rather than being sacrificed to it.

When I was reading, I found myself reminded of some of my other favorite off-kilter stories.  I picked up impressions similar to those I felt when reading the fantastical mechanical detailings in Haruki Murakami’s “The Dancing Dwarf.”  I noted a kind of odd tenderness comparable to when I first hit Amelia Gray’s “Babies.”  I believed six impossible things before breakfast like when I chowed down on Etgar Keret’s “Fatso.”  I was entertained by seemingly plausible absurdity in ways that were akin to my experiences with Donald Barthelme’s “Me and Miss Mandible.”

At the same time, just as Boucher only brings to life faint impressions of Muir’s old book that were buried deep in memory, I wasn’t actually seeing Murakami or Gray or any of the others when I read How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.  Instead, I was merely reminded of them.  How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is its own creature, just as the Beetle inside the book is its own creature.

How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive delivers a marvelous tale in a way that is fresh and entertaining.  Anyone who thinks writing either has to be rigidly traditional to the point of boredom or wildly experimental to the point of gibberish should check out this book.  It is a marvelous story, but also a strange and wonderful marvelous story.

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

Texas A&M University Press

$22.95

My first encounter with Brian Allen Carr was over the internet.  HTMLGIANT had just linked to this long diatribe I’d written about a semi-obscure video game from the 1990’s. I checked the comments section hourly, and eventually a poster came on under the handle BAC saying how badly he wanted to punch me, or anyone else who wrote about video games for that matter. We started e-mailing back and forth, and long story short, things culminated in a bar with Brian hugging me like a long lost friend. That stormy juxtaposition—the easy camaraderie of men and the threat of violence just beneath the surface of everyday life—is a huge part of Short Bus, Carr’s debut short story collection from Texas Review Press. His characters are wonderfully volatile, and Carr, in the tradition of Barry Hannah or Flannery O’Connor, never balks at allowing them to punctuate a story with a terrifying act of violence.

Short Bus focuses on the Texas/Mexico border, and many of its characters—hardscrabble men and women who wear their hearts on their sleeves—reappear throughout the collection. The strongest stories are ones where Carr surprises the reader with unexpected moments of violence, not for violence’s sake, but as a new lens to explore characters we think we have a handle on. Take, for example, this section of “Over the Border”, a moody story about three men who drive into Mexico for prescription pills:

“[The bum] smiled and bowed again. Then he turned to make his way into the nest of needles. Moving slowly, he raised a foot, his balance swayed and he held out his hands. That’s when Holt kicked. He reared back like a punter and struck the bum’s ass hard with the toe of his shoe, sending the grimy man face first into the spiky paddles, and the bum hollered as he thumped through the plant and toward the ground. His shirt tore on the way down, and he screamed when his body thumped the dirt.”

This completely unexplained and mostly out-of-character act of violence begins “Over the Border” before darting back in time to before the boys made their pilgrimage south. It serves most importantly as an intriguing prologue, but it also adds a well-deserved sense of menace to the entire story. In the pages that follow, as the boys joke and holler on their car trip, the level of tension never dissipates because that image of the bum kicked into the brush never fades. Who are these men? What does Holt’s violence say about them? What does violence say about us? These are the questions Carr mulls over again and again throughout the collection.

There are standout stories throughout. “Whisper to Scar” is a particularly moving piece about an unhappy father who, even if only for a moment, considers letting his handicapped son drown on a fishing trip he never wanted to take in the first place. The story is cringe worthy, but in a good way. Where so many writers often look away from the metaphorical car crashes they set into motion, Carr never flinches. Another highlight is the titular “Short Bus”, a bizarrely funny story about a special education teacher who leads his students on a bank heist after forcing them to listen to gangster rap. What makes “Short Bus” work is that the admittedly ridiculous concept is coupled with real emotion and insight reminiscent of the final pages of Douglas Coupland’s slacker classic Generation X. On his first day of classes, the protagonist confronts a silent student while the others play outside:

“Marisol’s body lay crooked. Her limbs shaped like a crab and pulled tight toward her… That was the first time I talked. Maybe it was the smell. Maybe it was the music. I whispered how I never wanted to be a teacher and all about the probation and my DWI and… every stick of gum I’d ever stolen and every drink of liquor that I’d ever let steal my brains. All of the girls I’d slept with. Every fight I’d been in. I spread out as I spoke, my fibers seemed loosened. And when the bell rang and the nurse came back and my conference was over, the steps seemed serene moving back toward my room.”

Like the violence, Carr knows when to seed in scenes of truly unexpected tenderness, and it’s the tension between these two impulses, peppered with dashes of hilarity and earnestness, that fuel his work. The standouts highlight this tension. “Hot Mess” focuses on a teenage boy jealous of his brother’s easy way with women despite having terrible burn scars inflicted on him by their father. “My Second Throat”, one of the many pieces of flash fiction included, might be the strongest overall story. Joyously sincere and prose-poem lyrical, it follows a soldier returned from war unable to face his old lover. “Water-Filled Jugs” follows the familiar route of an unhappy husband and wife, but here they are strangely fixated on ice cream as a metaphor for their marriage and an actual human skeleton they draw on with crayons.

Not every story is as memorable as those above. Much of the flash fiction is tough to get a handle on sandwiched between the longer sections. “Fake Pregnant” flickers around without ever giving its attention to any one story thread. “Face So Mild” ends with a man looking up videos of high school fist fights but doesn’t give us quite enough character to care very strongly. “Pale Milk” darts unannounced from one POV to another again and again, but there’s not much going on at the center of the story. However, these are small nitpicks more than anything, and even the stories that are less fleshed out than the best pieces in Short Bus still have the power to astound you with a single, well-placed line that lands like a punch to the sternum.

Brian Allen Carr’s Short Bus is a strong, often poetic debut collection of short stories that will be of particular interest to fans of Barry Hannah or Flannery O’Connor or even Chuck Kinder. There’s an innate southern sensibility humming just beneath these pages, and like the aforementioned authors, Carr is at his best when exploring the oddly murky line dividing love from hate, tenderness from violence. His characters are deeply flawed and almost always make the worst possible decision when presented with any and all conflicts. In so many ways, they are deeply relatable, funhouse mirror versions of ourselves.

~Salvatore Pane has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web, and his fiction has appeared in PANK, Annalemma, Quick Fiction, Hobart, and others. He blogs for The Rumpus, BOMB, PANK, and Dark Sky and teaches fiction at the University of Pittsburgh and Chatham University. His graphic novel, The Black List, will be published later this year, and he can be found online at www.salvatore-pane.com.~

Gallic Books

£6.99

Hector is a French psychiatrist who is dissatisfied because he’s not able to make people happy. He decides to look into matters by going on a trip around the world to observe what makes people happy—or unhappy. He travels to China, an unnamed African country, the United States, and back to China. While on his trip, he pauses to talk to people about happiness and produces a list of lessons.

This book is less a work of fiction than a slight narrative wrapped around this list—it’s packaged as fiction, but it’s not really engaged in the work that fiction does. Which is interesting, because one of the things that fiction does extremely well is look at how people try, and fail, to be happy. But this isn’t François Lelord’s task—Lelord is a French psychiatrist himself, not a fiction writer, and his task is to deliver up his list of aphorisms about happiness in a cute new way. So let’s take a closer look at these lessons that he offers to his readers. Here’s the first item on the list:

Lesson no. 1:  Making comparisons can spoil your happiness.

Indeed. I was just comparing myself to Lelord, and I’m looking pretty shabby in comparison. That guy is an international bestseller, first of all, and second of all, he’s French. Boom. My happiness just took a nosedive.

Although, there are all times when I am a) fuming over a ridiculous argument, b) wearing shoes that are producing seven or eight blisters on my tender feet, and c) waiting for 30+ minutes on a steamy subway platform. All of which produces acute unhappiness. But then—because my life is a morality play—cue the a) blind man, b) woman in the wheelchair, or c) earthquake in Japan. Comparison made. Suddenly my life, blisters and all, seems awfully cushy—lucky, even.

There are 23 items on the list, and don’t worry—I’m not going to argue with each and every one, but I do want to point out the problems with Lelord’s simplistic approach. Here’s a taste of some of the other lessons:

Lesson no. 2:  Happiness often comes when least expected.

Lesson no. 6: Happiness is a long walk in beautiful, unfamiliar mountains.

Lesson no. 19:  The sun and the sea make everybody happy.

Feel illuminated? Are the lyrics of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” coming to mind?

This topic—how to be happy—is a great one.  While we don’t often use the word “happy,” this is exactly what I spend most of my time talking about with good friends. What do we want in our lives? How can we balance things in a way that works? What is the content of a good life? Plato was chewing this one over in The Republic, and these questions are at the heart of many of our greatest works of philosophy, religion, literature, and psychiatry. It’s a worthwhile question. And worthwhile answers aren’t that difficult to find—which leaves me with the question: why do we have so many non-worthwhile answers floating around? Hector and the Search for Happiness is a collection of old chestnuts wrapped up in pink and yellow ribbons. This does not make a meaningful contribution to the topic. Innovative and clear thinking makes a contribution; the courage and honesty to take on complexity make a contribution. This dumbed-down, singsong text made me feel like I was chewing on a mouthful of feathers.

It’s clear that I’m in the minority about this book—as its cover will tell you, it’s an international bestseller. Other people use words like “cute” and “charming” to describe it, and apparently these people value cute and charming over clarity and reason. It might seem charming because Lelord uses the cadence and tone of a children’s book—which is utterly appropriate since he has produced a book suitable only for childish minds. Those of us who are adults will want much, much more than this and—happy, happy day!—we’ll be able to find it elsewhere.

~Rebecca Leece was a runner-up in the 2011 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest and has been published in Monkeybicycle. She has worked for BOMB Magazine, LIT, and Electric Literature. More of her book reviews can be found at www.rebeccaleece.wordpress.com.~