The Cool Part of His Pillow

Rodney Ross

Dreamspinner Press

Reviewed by: Nancy

5 out of 5 stars

Summary


The midforties are that time in a gay man’s life when his major paradigm shifts from sexy to sensible. But when Barry Grooms's partner of twenty years is killed on Barry's forty-fifth birthday, his world doesn’t so much evolve as it does explode.

After navigating through the surreal conveyor belt of friends and family, he can't eat another casserole or swallow much more advice, and so, still numb, he escapes to Key West, then New York. He embraces a new mantra: Why the hell not? He becomes so spontaneous he's ready to combust. First, he gets a thankless new job working for a crazy lady in a poncho, then has too many drinks with a narcissistic Broadway actor. Next, it's a nude exercise class that redefines flop sweat, and from there he’s on to a relationship with a man twenty years his junior, so youthfully oblivious he thinks Karen Carpenter is a lesbian woodworker.

Yet no matter how great the retreat from the man he used to be, life's gravity spins Barry back to the town where he grew up for one more ironic twist that teaches him how to say good-bye with grace.

My Review

This story is one painful year in the life of Barry Grooms. He is celebrating his 45th birthday with Andy Morgan, his partner of 23 years, and a group of their close friends. Both men are successful in their careers, live comfortable lives, and are still deeply in love. Barry’s life is shattered when he learns that Andy and their pugs, Gertie and Noel, are killed instantly when a crane and empty 10-story building collapsed on his parked car while they were inside. Barry’s not even sure why Andy was there in the first place.

Now Barry has to deal with the sudden emptiness in his life and while reading his first-person perspective, I suffered right along with him. It took me four days to get through Barry’s story, not because it failed to hold my interest, but because it was so painful to me. Barry was like the close friend I didn’t know how to comfort. Spending too much time with him was emotionally draining, and I felt completely helpless in the face of his grief. I was thankful for his colorful friends and his supportive mom who were there to ease his grief when it became too much for me.

Andy’s very public accident hasn’t managed to stay out of the paper, and Barry is not in the mood for Christmas, so he takes off to their house in Key West, Florida. More friends, more reminders of Andy, and Barry sells his home and his business, and is off to New York City.

I loved Barry’s reminiscing that showed some of the problems he and Andy had as well as their deep love for each other:

“If only I’d known. I would have been the first to apologize, not just then, but every time we battled. Early in our relationship, my suitcase had been packed by me and, a couple of times, for me, once being told, “Go home to mother!” I scurried for the front door, screaming, “At least I have one!” This made him cry. Over time, the luggage got nicer and the arguments remained petty, but we were careful they left no permanent nicks.”

“Andy and I carried a kindergarten school photo of the other in our wallets, behind our driver’s license, a reminder of who we were before we knew the other existed.”

It’s not all sad. There were wonderfully humorous moments too, like the one that nearly had me flying off the treadmill at the gym when Barry and his sister, Olivia, were working a summer job at Winky’s and Barry had to help her find her missing wart. Yes, you read that right.

Barry’s empty life fills up again as he starts dating and takes a management job at Theatrilicious, a shop specializing in rare and unusual theatre collectibles. He eventually meets a young man who makes him feel desirable, but this is not a romance story. Barry has work to do to move past his grief. There is more loss and heartbreak before Barry does find some healing and closure.

Though this story was sad and painful at times, it was also thoughtful and humorous. If my husband should suddenly die, I have a feeling I will be looking for Barry’s story to comfort me.

Also posted at Goodreads
 

Patriarch Run by Benjamin Dancer

Patriarch Run by Benjamin Dancer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”About three thousand years ago there was a Chinese artificer named Yan Shi who made a robot that looked like a person. It could walk, sing and dance. And it had an eye for women.”

It was clear from Billy’s expression that he was skeptical about such things.

“One day Yan Shi brought is robot to the king. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. The exhibition went perfectly until the robot started being lewd with the women. That incensed the king.

Yan Shi knew he would lose his life if he couldn’t get the king to excuse the robot’s behavior. So he dismantled it.

When the king saw all the parts, he was amazed. The robot had muscles over the bones. Tendons and ligaments. It had hair and teeth.”

Billy had stopped eating. His eyes were but slits, and he was looking at the Colonel sideways. “How did he make it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How come the Chinese can’t make one like that today?”

“Maybe they can.”


Yan Shi, the artificer. Photo kindly supplied by Benjamin Dancer.

The book begins with Billy searching for the family owned herd of Bison that has busted through the fence on their way to greener pastures. I can remember many times, first thing after school, hopping in the pickup with my Dad to go put some cattle escapees back in where they are supposed to be. We owned a couple of horses, but generally we used dirt bikes and pickups to chase cattle. My brother and I had some spectacular wrecks on those dirt bikes because ground is usually put to grass because it is too rough and unsuitable for farming. Trying to keep an eye on the cattle and an eye on the ground may have prepared our peripheral vision for playing basketball, but with obstacles such as grass masked holes, hollers, and chunks of rock it wasn’t infrequent for an OOHHHH SHIIITTT to be heard coming from one of us...usually putting a grin on the other. When four wheelers came along they were a lot safer alternative to negotiating abrupt changes in terrain. (Kansas by the way is not as flat as it has been made out to be.)

Billy is old school. He and his horse Maiden go out, and certainly more gently, convince errant livestock back into the proper pasture. (The instigator of the break outs is a bull named Moses...let my bison go.) Billy even rides his horse to school, a hundred year old flashback in time. His mom is dating the Sheriff. A man that Billy respects. Billy doesn’t fully understand his girlfriend, but then that is just par for the course for any teenage boy or middle aged man or a man in his twilight years. Life is feeling pretty stable for Billy.

That is until his Dad shows up.

Jack worked for the government. He did whatever they needed him to do to keep the world or at least the United States safe. He was a true believer in the inherent goodness of America and for a while he could justify anything to himself...until he turned. A friend of his father tries to explain it to Billy.

”Each betrayal takes another piece of you. Chips you down. Decades go by. The change is slow. Then one day you wake up and see her entirely differently.”

“See who?”

“America. You realize the woman you fell in love with as a young man has always been a whore.”

On his last mission in China Jack disappears and takes with him the very technology that he was supposed to steal for his government. It is a weapon, aptly named Yan Shi, powerful enough to sabotage the digital infrastructure of civilization, basically, this weapon if deployed takes us all back to the stone age, overnight. Now you might think that Jack is planning to have the big pay day by selling the technology to the Russians or to North Korea or maybe to Pakistan, but Jack is not interested in money.. He isn’t a traitor not in that sense. He is interested in the future of humanity. He is a man obsessed with growing human population numbers and now he has the power of a god in his hands.

”The growth of the human population as I write is estimated to be 1.3% per year. At the current rate of growth the population will double every fifty-three years. Six to twelve, twelve to twenty-four billion human beings in a century. To put those twenty-four billion people in perspective, the world’s population a hundred years ago was one point six billion.

Unfortunately, the resources required to sustain our civilization are not growing at the same rate as the human population. The United Nations estimates that 15% of the population goes hungry today. That’s nearly a billion people. The balance is off.”


Benjamin Dancer, truthsayer.

As Benjamin Dancer points out the American Farmer has increased production fifty-fold. Technology has kept enough food arriving at your local grocery store (for most of us), but if something happens; if the grid shuts down; if catastrophic things happen one after another; it will be like a row of dominoes that can not be set back up. That grocery store brimming with food is now out of food in three days... maybe less. Trucks are not moving, nothing is being produced. We only have what we have on Day ZERO. Two hundred million people would be dead after the first year.

Hunger is our predator.”

So only a madman would press the button that would spell doom for so many, right?

Jack has faced the reality of numbers that most of us are reluctant to even contemplate. If he ends the world now the cost will be considerable less than if he lets “nature” take it’s course. Two hundred million dead are only a drop in the bucket of how many would die in the first year of chaos in say fifty years. If you can convince yourself that humans are a plague on this earth it becomes a lot easier to press that button, but for Jack it is much more practical than that. He sees this as a chance to save humanity not destroy it.

Billy, his mom, and the sheriff find themselves thrust into the whirlwind of Jack’s life. Various government agencies are after him. With so much at stake, Billy and the people he cares about are mere chaff in the wind.

”Bullets ripped through the patrol car ringing the sheet metal; safety glass sprayed through the cabin; stuffing oozed from the sheriff’s seat; the rear window wasn’t there anymore; beams of sunlight pierced two long holes in the roof liner.”

This is just a small taste of a larger picture Dancer paints of bullets, fear, and determination as Billy finds himself pitted against a father he never knew and a world he is just beginning to understand. This book will send a shiver of fear down many of your backs. Even though I have been aware of the population math for some time, the way Dancer presents it made me have to take a long walk between a few chapters. I believe, because I am the eternal optimist, that we will make the necessary changes not only with technology, but with education.

Maybe if we get lucky/unlucky something will scare us enough to start thinking about the future and not just the present. Hopefully that won’t be something catastrophic, but just something that will give us a good knock in the head. Dancer kept my attention throughout the book. A team of wild bison couldn’t have kept me from turning the pages of this story.

Besides Yan Shi, Dancer sprinkles a couple of other real life people into his story.


”This is an image of Ed Wilson who represented the CIA through a front company (Consultants International). In my story (p148), Ed Wilson tries to get Jack to help in the Iran-Contra struggle.” Photo text and picture supplied by Benjamin Dancer.


”Howard Hart, the CIA station chief in Iran during the time Jack was there (p134). Hart actually filed the report Jack refers to in the story.” Text and picture supplied by Benjamin Dancer.

On his Amazon profile Benjamin has a great movie trailer about the book that you really should take a couple of minutes to see. http://www.amazon.com/Benjamin-Dancer...

I also asked Benjamin for a couple of free stories that I hope will give you some idea of his writing chops.

Stories by Benjamin Available for Free:

http://caralopezlee.com/blog/2014/02/...

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bow-m...









View all my reviews

A Dark Love Letter to Iceland

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
2013
Reviewed by Diane K. M.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars


Brrr! This wintry novel about a woman accused in the 1828 murders of two men in northern Iceland was filled with shiver-inducing descriptions of the harsh, yet beautiful, rural landscape. Even though I was reading this on a warm summer day, the chilly language made me think about reaching for a shawl.

Hannah Kent, who is from Australia, says she became interested in the true story of Agnes Magnusdottir when she traveled to Iceland in 2003. Agnes was the last person in the country to be executed. She was beheaded in 1830 for her role in the murders of Natan Ketilsson and Petur Jonsson. Kent researched the facts of the case and has written a compelling version of what might have happened while Agnes was awaiting her execution.

Kent's prose is lovely and so descriptive that you feel as if you are in that remote Icelandic village. The novel is a bit slow to start, but picks up when Agnes is transferred to a farmer's home to await her fate, and a compassionate reverend starts to visit her. Agnes is reticent at first, but eventually opens up and discusses her past and her relationship with the murdered men.

"I remain quiet. I am determined to close myself to the world, to tighten my heart and hold what has not yet been stolen from me. I cannot let myself slip away. I will hold what I am inside, and keep my hands tight around all the things I have seen and heard, and felt. The poems composed as I washed and scythed and cooked until my hands were raw. The sagas I know by heart. I am sinking all I have left and going underwater. If I speak, it will be in bubbles of air. They will not be able to keep my words for themselves. They will see the whore, the madwoman, the murderess, the female dripping blood into the grass and laughing with her mouth choked with dirt. They will say 'Agnes' and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there."

While overall I liked the book, one of my complaints was that Kent would switch between third-person and Agnes' first-person perspective, and some of the changes were so jarring and abrupt (with no visible page break) that I sometimes had to backtrack and reread paragraphs to make sense of what I was reading. This is Kent's first novel, and this kind of structural messiness should have been fixed by an editor. I think the whole story could have been efficiently told from third person, OR the shifts between the perspectives should have been telegraphed better. Kent does get credit for including a pronunciation guide for Icelandic letters at the beginning of the book, which was helpful.

But this feels like quibbling in what was a mostly enjoyable read. I liked the relationship between Agnes and the reverend, and how the feelings of the farmer's family, which were at first hostile to hosting a prisoner, slowly changed over time as Agnes proved herself a useful worker. I also liked the glimpse into the workings of a 19th-century village and the differences between the homes of the poor farmers and those of the wealthy commissioner. I would recommend "Burial Rites" to fans of historical fiction or anyone who would appreciate this "dark love letter" to Iceland.

Antipaladins and Archliches: An Interview with Jess Gulbranson

Today's guest is Jess Gulbranson, author of Antipaladin Blues.

How did you hook up with Legume Man? 
It's funny that I lived with Antipaladin Blues for so many years, and have kind of put it out of my mind for a while due to my illness, that thinking about it fresh has allowed me to dig up some really good thoughts about its origin.

I had just written 10 A BOOT STOMPING for the 3Day Novel Contest, and saw their submissions call. If I recall correctly, they posted on the wild wild west that was the old Bizarrocentral forums. I've certainly had (and will continue to have) aesthetic disagreements with the bizarro scene, but I made a lot of lifelong friends there and I would definitely not be as published as I am today without Rose and crew being so welcoming. I will always give props to that, and of course to the fine folks at LegumeMan.

What made you want to write Antipaladin Blues?
That's a tough one- why does anybody want to write anything? In this case there was a specific scene that sort of sprung into my mind and wouldn't go away: a government wizard, his black knight retainer, and some guards raiding a warehouse and killing a bunch of people. That scene is in Blues almost unchanged from how I imagined it.  The likely explanation is that I saw The Limey right around the time I started writing it. The warehouse massacre is one of my favorite movie scenes, and I do have Kannon (the protagonist) quote Terence Stamp as a shout-out.

What would you say the biggest influences on Antipaladin Blues were?
D&D, obviously, but more specifically the campaign world that I was working on as young as 9 or 10 with my best friends growing up. Blues started with the inspiration I mentioned earlier, but as I started to expand it I realized that I was more motivated by deconstruction of the typical fantasy world as expressed by a D&D campaign run by adolescents or teenagers. Keeping that artifice in mind was very important. Another big influence was old detective fiction- Chandler and Hammett. If you look at the characters in Blues, they're not epic fantasy archetypes. They're cops on the take, corrupt feds, mob enforcers, etc. Kannon himself was influenced by an idea I had about Tommy Vercetti from GTA: Vice City. The idea of a guy whose job it is to be 'evil', but beneath that thinks of himself as honorable or duty-bound, but beneath that is really a brute who enjoys breaking legs... I couldn't resist.

Are you currently a Dungeons and Dragons player?
I hang out on a notorious game design forum...if the old BC forums were the wild west, then this place is the club from Hostel. Smart people, but not shy about vivisection. One of the forum members is a Lovecraftean scholar and former Shadowrun writer, and he ran a year-long campaign of 3.5 D&D that was so fun, so literate that it has pretty much spoiled me on playing D&D. That being said, I'd still love to join a group but between my illness and unreasonably high standards, it's tough.

If money and death were not obstacles, who would you cast in an Antipaladin Blues movie?
I habitually cast my characters when writing them. Kannon looks like vocalist extraordinaire Mike Patton. Chamberlin is Samuel L. Jackson, and Averly is Jenny Shimizu. Frank's voice has always kind of gone back and forth for me- somewhere between Keith David and Bill Nighy.

Any plans to continue the story begun in Antipaladin Blues?
Yes. When it was first picked up by now-defunct publisher Evil Nerd Empire, in its uncompleted state I had imagined one long novel. The publisher insisted on having it be three short novels, so the first installment could come out ASAP. That of course was the exact opposite of what happened. Atypically for me, the next two installments (Archlich Hotel and Johnny Devil Comes To Town) are actually completely outlined and plotted. I've written a sizable chunk of book two but I'm going to get myself back on track before I continue.

What other works have you published?
My amazon page should say it all, but I do have two full novels- MEL, my first, which was written serially for an online arts mag, and 10 A BOOT STOMPING 20 A HUMAN FACE 30 GOTO 10 which, to be perfectly honest, is a fucking great book and I can't believe I wrote it at all, much less in 71 hours.

Would you say more fantasy authors need to think outside the Tolkien box with their stories?
Absotutely. The problem with the Tolkien box is that it's not even his box anymore- it's the Tolkien-by-way-of-D&D-box, and while it might be great for firing the imaginations of the multitudes, it's pretty stultifying as far as tone and subject matter. There need to be better approaches to fantasy- either stuff like Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris books where Tolkien is implicitly rejected, or like Mary Wells' Wheel of the Infinite where Tolkien just isn't even a relevant issue.

If you woke from an opium-induced haze and found a woman with an ice pick stuck in her neck in your bed, what would you do?
I'm no spy, and I'm no murderer, I'm just a boring suburban guy who happens to already have a plan for situations like these. No details that I can share, though, because I think it is a trick that will only work once. But once will be enough. [/creepy]

Who is your favorite author? 
That's always so hard. The main influences I cite are Stephen King, Mark Twain, Hunter Thompson, HP Lovecraft, Gene Wolfe, and Marquez.

What is your favorite book of all time?
Speaking of Gene Wolfe and Marquez... I think for me it's been a tie between Shadow of the Torturer and Autumn of the Patriarch for best books ever written.

What are you reading now?
The False Magic Kingdom Cycle by Jordan Krall. It's inspiring, since it's very very good, and also very similar in structure and content to a project I had going. Makes me want to resurrect that project, even though it's really hard to compare them. Krall is an amazing writer, and he is forging his own path in the writing and publishing world.

Is there a book that made you want to be a writer?
I've been writing ever since I can remember, intermittently. I think the very first time a book blew me away and made me write then and there was the HPL collection Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, when I was 8 or 9.

What do you have coming down the pipeline?
My 5-year-old daughter and I are working on a tabletop rpg called Castle on the Edge of the Moon. It uses FATE: Core as a system, and is equal parts Adventure Time, Fallout, and Studio Ghibli, with a sprinkling of Thundarr and Axe Cop. We're hoping to get it finished and hopefully crowdfunded this year. She's great to work with, a limitless imagination. She got her first story published this year, in a horror/bizarro anthology! I have a couple of short fiction projects that Garrett Cook and I are chipping away at, and a mostly complete novel (magical realism, see Marquez obsession above) that needs to go through the rewrite grinder. Plus some kids' books that I work on idly from time to time. Apart from that... well, I'm using my illness as an opportunity to reinvent. Not sure what kind of writer I'm going to be if/when I come out the other side. Hopefully a better one.

Any advice for aspiring writers?
An essay of mine on that topic got published a couple years ago. The thumbnail version: start now. Don't wait. This is the absolute most important first step. Don't think about agents or markets or your abilities. You may suck at first, but you always throw out the first pancake anyway, right?

Antipaladin Blues

Antipaladin Blues by Jess Gulbranson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When the forces of good prove to be a bunch of assholes, the world needs a bad guy to settle the score. With his demonic spiked armor and flaming sword, Kannon comes to the City of D to set things right...

Antipaladin Blues is a novella that takes the standard Dungeons & Dragons inspired fantasy tropes and drops them on their heads. The main character is a carnage-loving antipaladin and the rest of what will eventually resemble an adventuring party consist of a denim-wearing mage, a lady alchemist trying to make a go of things in a man's world, and Frank Burley, last of the red-hot archliches.

The worldbuilding is surprisingly good for a novella of this type. Imagine a world where wizards suppress non-magical healing techniques and the emperor plots against his own people.

The book runs on ultraviolence and anachronistic humor, reading like a twisted version of Sam Raimi's Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. There are also quite a few Dungeons and Dragons inside jokes, making for a funny read but at no time does the humor descend to a silly level. The ultraviolence is the star of the show.

The thing that separates Kannon from a lot of dark fantasy characters is that he knows what he is and loves it. There's no lamentation, no regrets, just a bastard in a spikey suit of armor kicking ass and taking names, the asses in question belonging to paladins, wizards, angels, psionicists, and all sorts of other things.

Antipaladin Blues is a fun read and I'm hoping Jess Gulbranson continues the story in the future. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

View all my reviews

A Classic Noir Novel by Bruce Elliott

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Four out of five stars

This is a classic noir novel, originally published in 1952, that had long been virtually forgotten. Happily, it has been resurrected by the folks at Stark House Press and republished in a new double edition that also contains the excellent Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze.

The protagonist is Larry Camonille, who has just led a prison break in which ten cons have escaped from the state pen in Joliet, Illinois. Camonille makes his way to Chicago where his girlfriend is supposed to be waiting with the money that Camonille has entrusted to her. Inevitably, of course, he arrives in the Windy City only to find that both the girlfriend and the money are long gone.

Camonille is not in the best of health and has only one lung. He is determined to make his way to Mexico, where he believes that the weather will be better for his health. But he's broke in Chicago, and one by one, the cons he escaped with are making the mistakes that allow them to be recaptured and sent back to prison.

Camonille is determined to avoid that fate and so robs a dope house to get some traveling money. He loses that fairly quickly to a sadistic railroad detective and finds himself broke again and on the road outside a small town in Ohio. His luck seems to turn for the better when a woman named Vera picks him up in her Cadillac and gives him a ride to a roadhouse outside of town. Vera is a widow who has some miles on her, but she knows the manager of the roadhouse and convinces him to give Camonille a job as a dishwasher.

In the usual fashion of a book like this, Camonille's situation gets trickier as things move along, and before you know it, the plot involves crooked lawyers, bickering spouses and a young teenage girl who is strangely attracted to Camonille, just as is his patroness, the lush and randy Vera. It all makes for a very combustible mix that includes more than a little kinky sex, which is fairly vividly described for 1952. The poor hapless Camonille is determined to escape the lawmen who are still hunting for him and to make his way to Mexico, but all sorts of webs are tightening around him and the odds of his making it don't look good.

All fans of noir fiction should be grateful to Stark House for reprinting this book and it's companion. They are both great reads and true classics of the genre.

Sssedarisss Isss A Ssseriousssly Sssilly Assss

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the title suggests, much of Me Talk Pretty One Day revolves around speech and speaking:

> Back in school lil' David (I guess he's still kind of little, isn't he) was forced into correcting his sibilant speech by a highly determined therapist. We're led to wonder if she wasn't stamping out boys' lisps through out the North Carolina school with an ulterior motive.
> A move from NY to Paris prompts David to take French lessons in France with hilarious results.

But that's about all there is to the main topic in this 5 disc set*. The rest is a mixed bag of topics:

> A stint as an avant garde performance artist.
> Drug use.
> His hilariously red-necked brother.
> The lives and deaths of family pets.
> Annoying American tourists.
> Teaching a writing course and having no idea how.
> Learning guitar from a sexist midget.
> Stories about his entertaining father.

That mixed bag of topics brings with it a mix in tone. Some pieces are just flat out funny, while others have a deeper meaning and seem almost too serious to laugh at...and yet I do.

Is there a mix in quality as well? My little jury of one is out on that still. I've listened to this one many times, maybe more than any of his others, and while I enjoy the heck out of it, there are long stretches where I wasn't laughing. Usually the ha-ha down-time is filled with me pondering expansively upon his chosen subject matter, so I'm never bored or disconnected from the Sedaris experience. But those looking for wall-to-wall laughs be warned.


* You really have to listen to Sedaris read is own material to get the full funny out of it. He is a humorist after all, and much like a comedian, you wouldn't get as many laughs from reading a script of their stand-up routine as you would from watching them live.

F-ed Up Family No Matter How You Dress It Up

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Sedarises are crazy-ass muthafuckers! Loco gringos, hombre, loco.

Out of everything he's produced (I've read all of his major work and only missed a few short pieces) this is my favorite David Sedaris book. Yet, I don't recommend it...

...not always, not to everyone. The subject matter can be too much for some people, especially if they've been told that Sedaris is a humorist and then they encounter some the more depressing details of his real life experiences. I laugh my ass off at the bottom-feeder characters and occasional bargain basement morals herein, but some people will wring their hands and say, "Oh how awful."

Get over it and enjoy the ride, is my approach. The ride includes experiences of being gay and coming out (horrible and hilarious!), portraits of various family members that bring the people as vividly alive as any long-running tv show is capable, and living on his own for the first time, which includes apartment living in general and specifically the trials of low-income housing.

Sedaris is a master at what I call autobiographical short stories. They are short form pieces about his life and his life reads like carnival folklore, so seemingly unreal at times it feels surreal.

Some of his other books are not quite so warts-and-all. If you try Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim on for size, realize it may not suit you. Perhaps try on another first and ease your way into this strange fashion.


Audiobook Note: Listening to Sedaris read the audiobook is a must. He wrote the stories, hell, he lived the stories, so he knows how they're to be read. I've listened to him enough now that I can not only read his work in his voice, but also accurately guess at the necessary inflection in new material. Yeah, it's a gift...

Shine

Lauren Myracle

Amulet Books

Reviewed by Nancy

4 out of 5 stars


Summary

When her best guy friend falls victim to a vicious hate crime, sixteen-year-old Cat sets out to discover who in her small town did it. Richly atmospheric, this daring mystery mines the secrets of a tightly knit Southern community and examines the strength of will it takes to go against everyone you know in the name of justice.

Against a backdrop of poverty, clannishness, drugs, and intolerance, Myracle has crafted a harrowing coming-of-age tale couched in a deeply intelligent mystery. Smart, fearless, and compassionate, this is an unforgettable work from a beloved author.


My Review

I became curious about this book after it was mistakenly nominated as a finalist for the National Book Awards, instead of another similar-sounding title. It also appealed to me because it is about teenagers growing up in the rural south, the problems kids normally deal with, and the bigotry, poverty, drug addiction, and provincialism that affects everyone.

17-year-old openly gay Patrick lies comatose in a hospital bed after a brutal beating that occurred at the convenience store where he works. Though the evidence proves this is a hate crime, the town sheriff is quick to write it off and blame outsiders. Patrick’s friend, Cat, feels the truth is a lot closer to home and sets out to investigate despite admonitions to “leave it be”.

Living in a large city comes with its own set of problems, but after reading this story I’m really glad I didn’t grow up in the rural south. I hate the well-meaning, but too inquisitive people, and the fact that anything you do can become the subject of gossip, never to be forgotten. I hate the insular society that does not welcome change or embrace differences, the suspicious people who judge others, yet keep their own shameful secrets well hidden.

This is a gripping, realistic story with deeply flawed characters and a vivid setting. Cat’s own past has kept her from fully engaging with the people in her life, but Patrick’s savage attack breaks her out of her shell and forces her to peel back layers of the town’s façade to learn the truth about others and herself.

It is a grim story with many wounded souls, many problems, and few solutions. Patrick may be the most obvious victim, but he is far from the only one. And that just makes me sad.

Also posted at Goodreads

Who Says Words Will Never Hurt You?

Lexicon
by Max Barry
Published by Hodder & Stoughton

3 1/2 Stars
Reviewed by Amanda

Are you a cat or a dog person?

In the world of Lexicon, your answer reveals everything they need to know about you.  Who are "they"?  They are the poets, people who are hardwired to resist persuasion and to use language as a weapon against the rest of us.  Studying linguistics, personality and psychology, poets have the ability to subvert free will and compel us do as they wish.  The most powerful poets are given pseudonyms that appropriately demonstrate their mastery over language and, thus, over society:  T. S. Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, W. B. Yeats, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf.

Lexicon tells the story of Emily Ruff, a homeless teenage grifter who shows promise as a poet, and Wil Parke, a man who unknowingly survived an apocalyptic event in Broken Hill, Australia.  As Emily is recruited by the poets and sent to an exclusive school to cultivate her gifts, Wil is on the run from would be assassins for reasons unknown.  As their stories intertwine, Barry explores the power of words and the sway they hold over us.

Lexicon is a clever exploration of modern society.  In our media saturated culture, we are surrounded by words from a variety of sources, most of whom have a vested interest in persuading us to adopt their viewpoint or engage in action that is beneficial to them.  What are politicians, corporations, pundits, and advertising executives if not "poets"?  And, more often than not, they succeed in manipulating and coercing the American public.  There is so much spin that it's often hard to tell where the truth ends and the fiction begins--even more chilling is that many people don't even care, content to let the bias of others "think" for them.

While I enjoyed the premise of Lexicon and was certainly drawn in by Barry's fast-pace, the sense that it could have been more nagged at me.  Its premise is one that could lend itself to a more complex, nuanced examination of the ability of speech to influence, but Barry keeps it at surface level.  While Barry's intent seems to have been to write a fun, intelligent thriller, I would have readily signed on for something more substantial.  For example, the purpose of the poets and the intricacies of their organization is never revealed, and the specifics of how their influence works is given only a basic "nuts and bolts" explanation.

However, I was still set to give this a 4 star rating just for its inventiveness and the fun I had along the way, until the unsatisfying end.  No spoilers here--I'll only say that, for all the originality of the premise, the ending was underwhelming and predictable.