NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE :: Leigh Newman

As a proponent of the inverse correlation between the length of a work and its difficulty (poetry to short stories and on up), I have a high appreciation of the short form and try to read it as often and diversely as I can. Leigh Newman's recent collection won me over with the cover, followed by its description as a set of "dazzling, courageous stories about women struggling to survive not just grizzly bears and charging moose but the raw, exhausting legacy of their marriages and families." 

The first story, Howl Palace, was brilliant, and I went hunting for everything else Newman has written before I was half through with it. I was unsurprised to learn it won The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize, and was a Best American Short Story and Pushcart Prize selection.

Howl opens the night before a sixty-seven-year-old widow's real estate agent holds an open house at her property, which is listed as an "attractively priced teardown." To Dutch, however, "every good thing that had ever happened to me happened in Howl Palace. And every bad thing too. Forty-three years. Five husbands. Two floatplanes. A lifetime. It felt as if I should honor my home, that strangers shouldn't come around poking through the kitchen or kicking the baseboards, seeing only the mold in the hot tub and the gnaw marks on the cabinets from the dogs I'd had over the years, maybe even laughing at the name."

Dutch expounds on her history, with laugh-out-loud diatribes about life, her husbands (re Skip, number 5, "Shipping him off to a facility in Washington near his daughter wasn't exactly something I struggled with"), her dogs, her efforts ("If you are looking for a reason to split five cords of wood by hand each year for forty-odd years, consider my biceps at age sixty-seven"), and her surroundings (consider the oft-mentioned and somewhat secretive "wolf room"). 

Just as she's setting up for the open house cookout, the real love of Dutch's life, Carl ("the beautiful deviling heartbreak of my life"), comes to ask if she will watch his dog while he's away. It's something he knows she doesn't want to do, and "somehow" the dog gets loose, wreaking havoc and sending Dutch's pre-event anxiety through the roof. It also lends to her reminiscing, Carl's imprint on so many parts of her life and the realization of why he has come to that day.

Howl Palace is a bittersweet, raucous revisiting of a life as Dutch prepares to let go of the only thing she has left. Beautifully paced and painting a picture you could look at forever, Newman shows herself a master of her craft. I didn't want it to end.

The remainder of the collection is replete with the same gorgeous phraseology, stories full of intriguing, multi-layered characters in various surroundings. The sense of place is different in each, many evoking what one envisions when they think of the wild, bicep-building life in Alaska  (and yet some feeling they could take place anywhere). Not many stories feature a mastodon tusk as deftly and meaningfully as Newman does. Her writing is unique and clever, she is a wordsmith of the highest order. 

 My only "complaint" is that Howl Palace blew me so high out of the water I kept searching for its equal. An unfair ask, really, and beginning the set with that story is both a blessing and a curse. It's one of the best short stories I've ever read and it will keep me reading Newman's work well into the future. 

TACOMA STORIES :: Richard Wiley

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is republished here with permission

An eclectic assortment of dive bar owners, staff and patrons constitute "sixteen characters in search of a play on St. Patrick's Day, 1968" in the opening of Richard Wiley's Tacoma Stories. Following its heyday, Pat's Tavern is coasting into oblivion in Tacoma, Wash. The 13 stories that follow the introductory installment, "Your Life Should Have Meaning on the Day You Die," examine the lives of the players as they branch into the acts of their lives between 1958 and 2012.

One woman, daughter of two famous parents, visits Tacoma because "it's comfortable, it's beautiful, and it leaves me alone," wondering if a town can replace people and "hedge against the unabated loneliness of the human heart." Although place infuses Wiley's stories, it's the longing and wounded hearts that give them full color.

The search for meaning and connection is a common thread. In "The Man Who Looks at the Floor," retired spy Jonathan can't leave his spook days behind, enlisting his wife to be a "mole" and befriend a suspicious disfigured man. When Millie takes to the stranger, Jonathan begins to understand he's been paying attention to the wrong people all along. In "The Dancing Cobra," Wiley uses an accidentally misappropriated vibrator with humorous and touching effect to explore the relationships of several teens and adults.

Winner of the PEN/​Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction (Soldiers in Hiding), Wiley shines in the short form, absorbing the reader in slices of one town and its inhabitants while rendering them universal.

STREET SENSE: For fans of intertwined stories of loves, losses and longings over a lifetime; Wiley doesn't steer you wrong.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  Whenever Mary thought of Annabella Sciorra, she also tended to think about Sister Wendy Beckett, the British art-critic nun who said, "God did not give me the dangerous gift of beauty" on TV. Mary, who'd been in bed with Earl, her lover, drinking wine and eating crackers when she heard it, reacted as if Sister Wendy Beckett were speaking directly to her. She had the gift of beauty, dangerous or not, and this semi-cloistered art critic was asking her what she was going to do about it. It was a turning point for Mary, who pointed at Sister Wendy Beckett's television image. "What if she had  been beautiful?" she asked Earl. "How would it have changed her life, and how would the lack of beauty have changed mine? If I were Sister Wendy, would you be here in bed with me, Earl, drinking this wine?"

COVER NERD SAYS: Cover gut picked me another winner. Wood grain, bar coaster, hint of a night full of cigarettes and booze. Sign me up. I had a feeling there would be some good stories lurking beneath the wear and tear.

BAD KANSAS :: Becky Mandelbaum

A version of this review previously ran in Shelf Awareness and is reprinted here with permission. Bad Kansas published on September 15, 2017 and is available in paperback now.

The first stories in Becky Mandelbaum's Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection Bad Kansas ingeniously lay the foundation for the yearning and disconnect that weave through the compilation. In the openers, California is seen as nirvana, superior to Kansas in every way. Being in Kansas is akin to missing a better life; better food, politics, weather and people.

In her insightful and sometimes darkly comic pieces on loving and being loved, trying desperately to attain love or deal with its elusiveness, Mandelbaum uses disparate geography as a metaphor for the interpersonal divides love can't always conquer. A Kansas couple's incompatibility is only highlighted by a move to the supposed Golden State; a teen new to Wichita learns cliques are universal and flyover states not immune to class structure; and a man who relocates to be with a woman discovers his Kansas self isn't who either of them wants.

With an assured style, mixing in lyricism, wit and black humor, Mandelbaum dissects the mindset that "nicer" places bring nicer things and unhappiness is tied to where rather than who you are. The author also slyly works in moments that turn the initial premise on its head: a Kansas woman disenchanted with California's "perfect" weather likens mountain snow to a museum relic: "I want it to actually snow…I want the sky to do something." Another Kansan, familiar with a multitude of insects, is undone by a "Kafkaesque" California cockroach.  Engaging from start to finish, Bad Kansas is a smart, insightful debut.

STREET SENSE: A smart and pointed debut story collection about love and happiness viewed through the geographic lens of Kansas, its inhabitants and transplants.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  Take it from a born and bred California girl who had to spend a few years in Kansas. I had no choice but to share this oh-so-true gem:

The old man laughed. "You can't take a girl from California and stick her in Kansas. It'd be like putting a fish in a tree."

COVER NERD SAYS:  I asked to review this book based on the title and cover alone and it turned another of those occasions where my gut paid off. Then this weird thing happened. I was sitting outside reading it and, having not seen a grasshopper in over a year (at least), this guy kept following me around. You'll have to take my word for the fact that there's a grasshopper in that little circle there. Creepy.

SIBLINGS AND OTHER DISAPPOINTMENTS :: Kait Heacock

Disappointment, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Kait Heacock, publicist at Feminist Press, explores its vast chasm in her debut story collection, Siblings and Other Disappointments. Sad in myriad ways, these stories dissect disenchantment from a variety of viewpoints--between husbands and wives, parents and offspring, siblings, neighbors, crewmates and, often most excruciatingly, within oneself.

Heacock writes about difficult subjects with a smooth grace that acts like a salve, taking some of the sting out of recognizing and relating to them. Living, often simply existing, is painful:

"Peter was an agoraphobic. He couldn't explain what that was a year ago, but he could describe now what it was like to stand by the front door and feel the heat radiate off the knob, so sure it could burn you if you touched it.... He never would have guessed when he rented this one-bedroom basement apartment that it could become his waking coffin, that he would let her death bury him alive."

Heacock sometimes balances the hurt with slivers of salvation. Peter finds solace in the peregrinations of his insomniac upstairs neighbor. An artistic young man finds a small mercy on the fishing boat where he's sent to toughen up. As in life, however, not every story includes an emotional Band-Aid, and Heacock doesn't hesitate to wield her words like a knife. To be human is to wound and be wounded, and the 12 gritty stories in Siblings and Other Disappointments cut to the core.

This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is reposted here with permission.

STREET SENSE:  A debut collection worthy of getting a little guts spilled on your rug.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  She didn't ask her dad how things were going at the store or what he had been up to lately. His absence was more active than her mother's, richer and more full of anger. It was hard to hate someone who's dead; the living took the blow.

COVER NERD SAYS:  This is a frustrating cover because I'm not sure I can even put into words why I like it as much as I do. But the color scheme, the font, the repetition, the art work, all of it fits squarely into my wheelhouse. Covers for short stories must be difficult, with so many different emotions and characters and slices of life requiring a piece of the pie. But really, what's more disappointing than a sink full of dirty dishes (or the messy life it symbolizes)? Great cover work, maybe even more so because I can't be more clear about why.

INSURRECTIONS :: Rion Amilcar Scott

"My man God doesn't have holy rent and holy bills to pay."

Rion Amilcar Scott's Insurrections is a short story collection that embodies the every man and woman getting by in the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland. Young and old, the working and the unemployed, those beset by demons and the ones who try to help them, even if they themselves don't have the wherewithal to do so. The stories in Insurrections are about people, relationships, and the cracks and fissures that make each one unique, in strength and weakness alike.

In Good Times, Walter saves the life of his upstairs neighbor Rashid, a young father torn between his love for his family and his thoughts of suicide. All Walter wants to do is enjoy his Good Times sitcom reruns, but he's continually interrupted by Rashid, distraught over his misguided efforts to be worthy of his family, visits that light a fire under Walter's own demons and threaten his relationship with his wife.

The impact of family tragedy is at the forefront of A Friendly Game, in which a once-proud mother and library assistant who read to the local children swirls into drug addiction following the death of her son. "Joan's husband came one day with tiny white rocks, a butane lighter, and a glass pipe. What a brief intense dizzying derangement. Slipping from yourself for a few moments. That's how she described it and little by little, each time, less and less of her returned."

Years later, Joan is a street lady, tortured by the very boys she read to, who now see her as nothing more than a means to debase and destabilize each other in their own struggles over women and stature.

The way years of abuse can alter a mindset is highlighted in The Slapsmith. Nicolette is so used to being mistreated she can't even recognize real help when she finds it. Or did she find it? "Men having fun could sure sound menacing sometimes."

As a whole, Scott's stories are well-crafted and aspects of them linger long after reading. Individually, they are sometimes odd, often sorrowful, every once in a while providing a glimmer of hope. To his credit, Scott engages the reader, this one at least, in circumstances that range from recognizable to foreign to almost inconceivable. These are stories of people constantly at odds, fighting to find their way. It's not a new premise, but Scott's delivery is well worth the trip.

STREET SENSE:  A  satisfying and moving collection of stories about those up against it. Written with grace and complexity with rich characters and brutality drawn bare, this collection is recommended for those who don't thrive on Hollywood endings.

COVER NERD SAYS:  As a fan of bird imagery, this cover spoke to me immediately. I'm not even sure if I can relate the cover to the material. The birds all seem to be flying in somewhat similar directions. The characters in these stories certainly are not. The birds are different in color. These stories are centered on the African American experience in the town of Cross River. But maybe, no matter what color bird we are or what direction we're facing, we're all in the shit together and wouldn't it be nice if we could all give each other a little draft? Ok, probably too deep and far afield. Let's just say I love this cover, deep imagery or not.

ONE-HUNDRED-KNUCKLED FIST :: Dustin M. Hoffman

I didn't know anything about this book or its author when I spied the cover while perusing upcoming releases several months ago and it immediately jumped out at me. Once I cracked the cover it didn't take me long to realize I'd happened upon something special.

One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist is one of those reads that makes you want to scream about it from the rooftops immediately upon finishing. It also makes you want to contact the author to thank them. Which I did, and discovered that Dustin M. Hoffman is as much a gem as his book. Dustin was even nice enough to sit down and answer some questions in an interview that will run later this week.

Hoffman has one of the most extraordinary voices I've read in a long while. To be more accurate, he has many voices, as evidenced in the sixteen distinct stories in this debut collection. They are wonderful and weird and gross and gritty and ingenious. Some made me swear out loud in the best possible way, others simply left me silent with awe. Although the blue collar theme is carried throughout, each piece stands alone with a unique voice.

This collection is going to be a favorite of mine for 2016 and I'm now on the lookout for whatever Dustin has coming. I hope you'll pick up a copy. What follows is a version of the review that previously ran in Shelf Awareness:

"Life is full of lemon givers, and a smart man takes his fate and makes more than just complacent lemonade."

Dustin M. Hoffman's One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist is an ode to the men and women who are handed lemons on a regular basis--blue collar workers. The working class is often invisible and forgotten, folks trying to make their way despite the pressures exerted from above and at home, often under dismal circumstances. It is these pressures and circumstances Hoffman depicts so superbly over the course of sixteen stories.

Hoffman painted houses for ten years, but it is his craftsmanship with the written word that infuses these stories with atmosphere often visceral to the point of gut-knotting. From the commission salesman stressed to make sales so his manager's children can eat, to the ice cream truck driver who, despite beatings from rival thugs, keeps going to save money for his estranged children, to the hardscaping crew driven to violent conflict after a verbal sparring session gone awry, Hoffman shines a light on some dark slices of life in the trenches.

These are not easy stories. They are in turn crude, violent, outlandish, harsh and sometimes outright bizarre. But Hoffman deftly paints them with lines of beauty, determination and subtle humor that keep them from devolving into an exercise in depression. They are as varied as the trades they depict, but across the board they are engaging, bursting with authenticity, and often just plain brilliant.

STREET SENSE: Winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize, this nifty set of sixteen short stories takes a compelling trip through the pressure-cooker world of the blue-collar worker. Several of these stories blew my socks off. Highly recommended.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: I could type passages most of the day and not tire of re-reading them. This was a difficult choice. Hoffman is my favorite kind of writer - one who can write a glorious run-on and also express an idea in one short sentence. I picked the first quote because it was one (the first line of the second story) that really had me feeling I was in for something special:

We backhoed a gash through the silky sod, brown like a week-old scab, red at the center. That hole in the Glavine family's front lawn was a big dig, so deep it split us into pieces, and we were never right again.

And then there was this little line, almost a throwaway, that the woodworker in me adored:

Ramon's bare torso is so thin, as if God ran him through the planer.

COVER NERD SAYS: So simple, yet so effective. Many covers that go for simplicity miss the mark and end up looking like something thrown together over a kitchen table at midnight. Not so here. I saw this cover and was so intrigued by the title and imagery I knew I had to read it. Who doesn't want to know about a one-hundred-knuckled fist? This one goes in the big win basket as far as covers are concerned. Well done.

BENEATH THE BONFIRE :: Nikolas Butler

Nikolas Butler's Shotgun Lovesongs was one of my favorite reads from 2014, so my anticipation was high when I saw he had a new work coming out. When I learned it was stories rather than a novel, I felt a little dip in my anticipation, because I sometimes struggle to connect with stories. As soon as I cracked the first page of Beneath the Bonfire I knew I had nothing to worry about. Here is the opening to the first of ten stories in Beneath the Bonfire, entitled The Chainsaw Soiree (seriously, Butler had me with the title):

They squatted in an abandoned Pentecostal church high on the bluffs over a river, and when the rain or snow was heavy, the roof leaked and the church was loud with the dripping of water in metal buckets, and when the land was dry beneath the floorboards of the church, hundreds of rattlesnakes shook their maracas at the heat and only at night would the place fall into silence. I had visited sometimes in the spring when the snakes were lethargic and hungry for the sunlight, and we had stood around the church with machetes and rakes and turned the yellow grass red. It was a beautiful spot.

I am none too fond of animals meeting their demise in books, but when it's done with such an exquisite turn of phrase, how can one complain? Butler is a beautiful writer, and he gives his work a sense of place that is second to none. I say that as a tough audience for scene descriptions. I'm all about dialogue, character, and action, so when an author can make me clamor for another paragraph about setting, you know he's throwing heat. Take this entry, start of the heartbreaking Rainwater:

The old man and his grandson sat on the porch swing watching it rain. They swung according to the old man's rhythm; the little boy's feet dangling, his shoelaces untied, still inches off the sinking porch. Water collected in the grooves of the dirt and grass two-track driveway, and toward the barn chickens bobbed their heads and cooed low, high-stepping as they pulled earthworms free from the saturated black soil. A flag drooped heavy on its rusted and listing pole.

No reader could doubt where we are for this story, and much of the beauty is in the little, seemingly meaningless details - untied laces, sinking porch, driveway grooves. It's not often I picture scenes in my mind, but these are so good the painting is done before I even know it. Rainwater is a quiet chest-kicker of a story (my only reading notes - "***"), and it's at one end of the spectrum on which Butler writes. I'm not sure any writer guts me so deftly with such different instruments. Sometimes a violent thrust you see coming, other times a disemboweling so gentle you almost miss it until you've bled out.

When those stories are placed back-to-back in a collection, you get a bright light view of just how good Butler is. Take Morels, a story of three men, old friends bonded as family, who now have different lives yet meet to hunt for morel mushrooms. As usual, the stage is perfectly set:

The three men moved over the south-facing slopes above the valleys, their faces low to the ground, eyes sweeping the forest floor like midday searchlights. Their pursed lips clamped joints of marijuana, and over their shoulders their smoke went like the thick white whiskers of a beard in vain neglect. Bathed in the tang of smoke, they wet their lips occasionally with bottles of beer that they carried through thee forest in a heavy backpack, the bottles a set of oddly muted chimes.

But as sometimes happens when beer and drugs enter the mix of a day, things can get violent. Morels is a story rife with physical devastation and its aftermath. Yet as physical as Morels is, it packs no more powerful a punch than the story that immediately follows, Leftovers, which is a quiet tragedy of emotional devastation that eviscerates the reader just as surely and cleanly:

A bad quiet envelopes their marriage. Mason imagines a small-town telephone booth from which he calls her and waits for her voice. She answers, her voice like a very cold wind traveling through thousands of miles of telephone wire. Then she puts him on hold, leaving him there, through all time, waiting for either a dial tone or a dead click. Neither of which ever come. He grows older in that telephone booth, so much older, until it becomes his glassy coffin.

I realize I'm quoting an awful lot of text here, but I want to force-feed it to you until you cry "Uncle!" and run to your local indie and buy a copy. It's that good. Beneath the Bonfire is a collection of stories that makes you nervous and keeps you on edge, waiting for the pretty to turn painful; stories of relationships and family bonds (of blood and otherwise) that focus on the decisions people make and how those around them pay a price. Whatever price you pay for this book, it'll be worth it.

STREET SENSE: A stunning set of ten stories that seem to fit together seamlessly, despite being written over a ten-year period. Evoking harsh and unforgiving landscapes as the backdrop for harsh and unforgiving scenes, but written with a grace that makes you wish you were in them.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  Again from Rainwater, this is one paragraph:

So Friday nights he and the boy drove into town, ate supper at the diner beside the railroad tracks, watched passing trains, shared a sundae. Drove to the hardware store and bought die-cast trucks and tractors, little-boy underwear, overalls, thick socks, T-shirts, and sweat shirts. The little boy falling asleep across the bench seat of the old man's pickup truck as they jostled down country roads and toward the fallow farm, where the old man would park, admiring this little boy before lifting him out and carrying him inside, to his own bed, where he lay the boy and pulled the sheets and the gray wool blanket up and over his shoulders and kissed his forehead and touched his little-boy ears and then sat listening to his alarm clock tick and waiting for the sound of his daughter's car to come down the driveway until at last he went to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of cold coffee and wrung his hands and wondered silently how he had failed her.

COVER NERD SAYS: One of the great things about this cover is how it matches up with the cover of Shotgun Lovesongs. Same font, complimentary palette and imagery. I love everything about these covers together, but even taken as a solo image I would have picked Bonfire off a shelf or table without hesitation. And I would have recognized it as a book by Nikolas Butler even without seeing his name, which is pretty smart. These both float my cover nerd boat.

AFTERMATH LOUNGE :: Margaret McMullan

Every once in a while, a cover speaks to me and I just know I have to read the book it belongs to. Such was the case with Margaret McMullan's Aftermath Lounge. The combination of title and atmosphere created by the cover image (the solitude, those bent and broken trees) drew me in like a magnet and I was powerless to resist. And no, the dog didn't hurt, but it was something about that dog that evoked a sense of longing and desolation I needed to know about.

Turns out the cover serves the content well. Aftermath Lounge is a set of ten beautifully interwoven short stories about the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, taking place (for the most part) in the five years following Hurricane Katrina. Hence, the aftermath.

What I loved about these stories is their focus not on the storm or the physical atrocities it left in its wake, though obviously those are necessary elemental backdrops, but on the despair and resiliency of those who experienced it, either directly or through the inevitable ripples it caused in their world.

Each entry is a shot to the chest in its own way, but I was never more impressed by McMullan's short story skills as I was when reading the shortest of them. Writing a good short story is no easy feat. Writing one consisting of a few paragraphs that not only fills the frame but paints a heartbreaking picture is an awe-inspiring talent.

Take Holiday World, the third story in the set and the first to take place post-Katrina. Displaced with his family to Indiana, Billy finds himself separated from them at a water park. A water park. After surviving a hurricane and floods. The final lines took the air out of me. My notes for this story consist simply of the following: "Wow."

As with Holiday World, not all of the stories take place in Mississippi, with many following survivors or the family of survivors through their post-hurricane displacements. Despite the different settings, the Mississippi Gulf and Katrina are still an umbrella the characters can't get out from underneath, as the place and the storm have become part of them. No matter where they land, the echoes of the storm influence their lives and loves. They cannot shake the "Katrina patina."

In Place Value, the Zimmers ride out the storm with their daughter Diane and grandson Teddy in Chicago. Diane travels to Mississippi afterwards to check on her parents' home and returns quiet and withdrawn:

His mother gave Teddy's grandfather the gun and his grandmother the keys. She needed neither, she said, because everything was gone. "Just gone," she said again and again, her eyes welling up. "Nothing to open and no one to shoot."

Diane then takes off for Montreal with a boyfriend, leaving Teddy with her newly homeless parents, forcing them to forge another new existence. She returns after they suffer yet a further devastating loss, a loss they can't help but feel is a repercussion of the storm:

The hurricane had gone and washed through his grandparents' home and now it felt as though it was washing through their lives again. This storm had grabbed hold of them and wouldn't let go.

Many of the characters find their way into multiple stories, such that the group together tells the tale of many of them over the five year period. In Aftermath Lounge, recurring character Catch is taking care of the Zimmer property while it's being rebuilt. He wanders the site picking up pieces of broken china, and each night he sees how the pieces might fit together, working through multiple tubes of crazy glue putting plates, cups, bowls and saucers back together again, despite the chips and cracks he can never fill.

Catch also collects scraps of paper as he wanders the town and the property, putting them in his pocket throughout the day:

Catch reached under the bed and pulled out a shoebox. He emptied his pockets into the box, which was full of paper scraps. He thought of the words 'critical' and 'mass' and all the words on scraps of pages he'd found, the sentences he'd saved, some of which stood out like warning signs or prophesies...Maybe someday it would all make sense.

Each of the stories in Aftermath Lounge was previously published elsewhere, and while they certainly stand on their own, they make for a powerful collection. There is no respite, not even in the two pre-Katrina stories that start the book, because we know what's coming. We know what these characters are in for, what lies ahead. What we can't know is how they will react and rebound, and the pain and beauty in those stories are what make the book whole.

Margaret McMullan will be on tour discussing Aftermath Lounge beginning this week, and you can see a schedule of events on her website. I imagine these will be fascinating discussions, particularly leading up to the tenth anniversary of Katrina on August 29. The book will be available in some stores, but you can always get a copy through the publisher, Calypso Editions.

STREET SENSE:  As someone who often has a hard time "getting" short stories, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Even though they stand alone, the intertwining of the characters and story threads that run through more than one piece make this, as it is billed, a novel in stories, beautifully done.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  I couldn't decide between two, one for the beauty of the language and imagery and the other for the message. These stories are like a snake eating its tail; once you're done reading, you could start at the beginning again. Because even as they rebuild, the people of the region know they will face this adversity again in the future, but they still build on:

Maybe next time, because there would always be a next time, next time when the waters rose up again in walls, forcing itself into the homes and lives of all those people, maybe next time it will not carry so much away.

And I simply loved this sentence and all it evoked:

Volunteer trumpet vines bloomed and all the trees that had survived the hurricane were tilted away from the water like women fleeing.

COVER NERD SAYS:  Since I started this review talking about the cover, where I stand on it is likely already fairly clear. I loved it. It got me to read a book I knew nothing about, and when I was done I could look back at the cover and know it hadn't steered me wrong.

SWEET NOTHING: STORIES :: RICHARD LANGE

I first learned of Richard Lange through my friend Pop Culture Nerd, who raved to me about his work and then wrote stellar reviews of both of Lange's novels, This Wicked World and Angel Baby. Click the links to read those reviews, they're right on. Being a fan of Lange's work, I was thrilled to meet him at Bouchercon last year, where I picked up both of his sets of stories, Dead Boys (published in 2008) and Sweet Nothing, which just came out February 12th.

Sweet Nothing is an outstanding set of stories, told in Lange's eloquent, almost poetic, prose. Each story provides a glimpse at individuals from different walks of life, with various relationships to the line between right and wrong, and whose wants, needs, and desires are butting up against the laws of justice, humanity, and/or morality.

In the opener, Must Come Down, Haskell goes on a drive with his visiting father-in-law, David, a gemstone "middleman," and learns there is a seedy side to David's business dealings.  Haskell becomes more and more complicit with each stop they make, but his discomfort is in direct conflict with the reality of his life, where he and his wife wouldn't be able to make it financially without David's monthly stipend. Confronted with the power David holds over him, Haskell must decide how that power is going to impact him.

He thinks he's got me there.  A real Big Daddy moment, a real life lesson. But hypocrisy is the least of my worries, I have plenty of other good stuff to hate myself for.

Lange's stories also take place in a variety of time periods, addressing issues that humankind faced in the long ago past and will continue to face in a Lange-imagined post-apocalyptic society. In The Wolf of Bourdeaux, set in 1899, a prison guard struggles with the facility's rules and his humanity as he watches over an infamous child-killer, The Wolf:

Perhaps if I talked to a priest, I thought, he'd have some words of reassurance about the thickness of the walls between worlds and how one can wrestle with evil without being infected by it. I wouldn't have believed anything he said, but it might've provided temporary solace, like a soothing balm for a wound that can never heal. 

Whether you see them as good or bad, the people of Lange's stories are human, and therefore flawed, many deeply so. Yet the circumstances in which they find themselves are perhaps only a wrong turn or two from our own. Or perhaps we've walked in similar shoes. Lange's characters rarely outrun their flaws in these stories, but just as you begin to think everyone loses, Lange drops some moments of such hope and grace on you they hit like an anvil, all the more powerful for what came before them.

In the title piece, Sweet Nothing, Dennis has pretty much lost it all and finds himself renting a room from 450-pound Troy while working in a Subway sandwich shop. Dennis's fall from grace has been pretty epic:

I never thought about life before mine started to go wrong, I just lived it, like everybody else. But then you lose your job, and your wife leaves you for the neighbor and takes your kids, and you go from whiskey to weed to coke to crack just like the commercials warn you will. You lie and cheat and steal until one night you find yourself holding a knife on this guy, Memo, who's supposed to be your buddy, your partner in crime, and Memo gets the jump on you and gives you a concussion and you come to in jail the next day, bleeding out of your ear.
Stuff like that raises questions:  Why me? What next? Where will it end?

Yet even in his despair, Dennis has empathy for both Troy and a young mother who sits in the Subway at night, hoping her young daughter will come out of the coma she's been in since being hit by a car. Sweet Nothing is so many things.  A "There but for one bad decision go I" story, a "Don't judge a man until you've walked in his shoes" story, and a story about not losing your humanity when you've lost just about everything else.

I could keep quoting from Sweet Nothing all day, but instead will implore you to pick up your own copy.  The architecture of Lange's writing alone is worth the price of admission.

STREET SENSE:  A beautiful collection of stories about flawed people we may think we can't relate to and could never become, but ultimately realize are just one wrong step through a gauzy curtain away.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  The right woman can work miracles. I've seen beasts tamed and crooked made straight. But in order for that to happen, you have to be the right man, and I've never been anybody's idea of right.

COVER NERD SAYS:  I liked this cover before I read the book, it's a lovely piece of art even on a surface level.  But I really came to appreciate it after I read the stories within, felt a bit closer to that bleeding heart so close to being pierced, yet still emanating rays of, what?  Hope? Love? Light? Maybe, if we're lucky, all three.