Burrow Press

184 pgs/$15

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

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

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

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