Short Story Review: “Attitude Adjustment” by C.L. Gordon

Reality television is rarely about reality as it exists now – it’s more often about reality as we want it to exist. You’d think that such concepts would be reserved for the fictional shows, but no, someone, somewhere figured out a way to sell the viewing public content that is just as idealized even thought it is supposedly “real.” And the public loves it, just laps it up.

Thus you have shows on which overweight people lose large amounts of weight in seemingly unhealthy amounts of time; on which people win ungodly sums of money through manipulation, deceitfulness, and their mastery of over-sized obstacle courses in remote locations; in which people pretend to invite you into their lives for a peek at what it’s “really like” to be a redneck or a fashion designer or a movie star, even though “real life” doesn’t involve a handful of producers helping you make day-to-day decisions.

How far will the trend go? How much are people willing to alter their lives via made-for-tv shortcuts in the hopes of getting the kind of life they’ve always dreamed of? We’ve gone a long way down that rabbit hole, but according to C.L. Gordon, there’s plenty of room left on the downward slide.

In Gordon’s short story “Attitude Adjustment,” we’re brought on the set of a show called “Radical Makeover: Attitude Adjustment.” Participants on the show have agreed to a new neurological procedure to help them deal with the issues that they don’t have the ability – or the patience – to deal with through more traditional means. Thus, after a quick operation, the inhibited recluse becomes an impulsive hellion, the over-giver becomes the embodiment of selfishness, and so on and so on. On a set, and in a world, like this, who can be trusted?

It’s a good idea, one that I wish Gordon had delved into a little deeper. This is a short piece of writing, and really only takes a broad swipe at the concepts the author introduces. This is the kind of subject matter in which the more you know about the characters getting these procedures, the more engaged and invested you’ll be. In the short amount of space Gordon gives this story, we don’t really get full characters, just quick sketches. There’s also a little twist at the end, something which I generally enjoy but felt a little out of place here.

To say much more is to give too much away, and I don’t want to to that. “Attitude Adjustment” is enjoyable enough, but it really opened up a lot of questions that I’d like to see explored more fully. Perhaps this is a subject the author will return to at another time. In the meantime, if you’ve got a tiny hole in your reading schedule and ninety-nine cents to kill, you could do worse.

Review: ‘The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones’ by Jack Wolf

Your enjoyment of Jack Wolf’s The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones will be in direct correlation to your tolerance for the author’s gimmicky writing style. Wolf really wants us to feel that Olde English atmosphere he’s cooking up, and he leans heavily on old-school grammar rules such as capitalizing every noun and the use of arcane spelling (“drippt” instead of “dripped,” for example) to try and sell it.

The thing is, such gimmicks aren’t really necessary to capture the mood and the time period Wolf is trying to recreate. Go read any of the novels in Robert McCammon’s “Matthew Corbett” series and you’ll see that I’m right. Those books are set in roughly the same time period as Bloody Bones, but the only gimmicks McCammon resorts to are exacting research and impeccable storytelling.

So, for me, Wolf’s style here became a distraction, and as a result it took me a while to get into the story – which is shame, because it’s a pretty good story. Tristan Hart is, if not a wholly likeable character, a very compelling one. He’s curious, intelligent, and quite possibly completely barking mad. Much like a certain Doctor Frankenstein, Hart sometimes has a difficult time curbing his enthusiasm for new knowledge and new experiences. His greatest struggle is his attempt to understand his own overwhelming desires. He’s tortured but determined to simultaneously control and satisfy urges he can’t fully explain. It’s the kind of struggle that would be tough to witness in a character you’re rooting for, but Wolf isn’t completely successful in making Hart a sympathetic lead.

Hart’s struggle parallels the world he’s growing up in. It’s a time when new ideas are really starting to hold their own versus the old ideologies that have an iron grip on people in general and society as a whole. It’s heady stuff, and to pull off over 500 pages of it requires a light touch that Wolf hasn’t quite developed. There’s good material here, and Wolf is definitely a solid talent worth keeping an eye on, but he can’t seem to get out of his own way this time around.

My advice to Wolf would be to let the story take over. Stylistic touches can be nice, but rely on them too much and you end up derailing the very thing readers come for – the narrative. The plot. The STORY. In the case of The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones, the story didn’t completely come off the tracks, but it easily could have been a much smoother, more satisfying ride.

Short Story Review: “Dying to Forget” by Sunni K. Brock

“Dying to Forget” by Sunni K. Brock
From The Devil’s Coattails edited by Jason Brock and William F. Nolan
Cycatrix Press, 2011

In which we meet a man named Tim as he is hopping from consciousness to consciousness, inhabiting the bodies of random people in their final moments of life. The guilty lover with a rope around his neck; the sword swallower with a fatal tickle in his nose; the blind man with a faulty heart…he’s there for all of them, experiencing death with them – or, perhaps, for them. No one wants to die, but Tim is able to push through the experience multiple times – until he looks in a mirror during one of his “stops” and sees a familiar face staring back at him. Suddenly, Tim is no longer interested in riding the wave to the next death. Suddenly, he decides to take matters, and fate, into his own hands.

“Dying to Forget” is a compact, economical sucker punch of a story with a touching and surprisingly poignant ending. No matter how you may feel about editors who include their own work, or the work of a relative or loved one, in something they produce (Sunni Brock is editor Jason Brock’s wife), there’s no doubt that this particular tale is a snug fit in this collection.

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Short Story Review: “The Man in the Ditch” by Lisa Tuttle

“The Man in the Ditch” by Lisa Tuttle
From A Book of Horrors edited by Stephen Jones
Cemetery Dance/PS Publishing, 2012

“The Man in the Ditch” is a tense and unsettling contribution from veteran genre author Lisa Tuttle. It starts with a simple yet disturbing image: a dead body by the side of the road. Or, at least, that’s what Linzi thinks she saw. She can’t convince her husband J.D. to turn around, but the idea of it – and the fact that she saw it so close to the land where the couple is about to build a new home – shakes Linzi to her core and throws a pall over the whole day.

Linzi’s refusal to let the idea go is just another wedge in what appears to be a somewhat shaky marriage. There’s a dark secret between Linzi and J.D., a single misguided act that resulted in a large gap in their marriage. It leaves Linzi on an island, and Tuttle takes a nearly sadistic glee in ratcheting up that sense of isolation throughout the story. In her marriage, in her new home out in the country, in her inability to conceive, and in her absolute belief that something dreadful is haunting her, Linzi is alone at every turn.

This is the kind of horror story that finds true fear in the details, the subtle moments, that quiet pause before the big explosion. It’s the kind of story that stays with you. It’s the kind of story that makes collections like this so damn good.

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Short Story Review: “The Woods Colt” by Earl Hamner, Jr.

“The Woods Colt” by Earl Hamner Jr.
From The Devil’s Coattails edited by Jason Brock and William F. Nolan
Cycatrix Press, 2011

Earl Hamner Jr. created two well-known television shows from the 1970s, Falcon Crest and The Waltons. This might make his appearance in an anthology of dark fiction a bit surprising, but it’s less of a surprise when you realize that his other writing credits include eight episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Subject matter notwithstanding, Hamner’s story “The Woods Colt” has more of a Waltons vibe than a Twilight Zone vibe. It feels a bit old-fashioned in pace and execution; this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a bit jarring when held against some of the edgier content found in The Devil’s Coattails up to this point.

The story centers around a man named Fletcher who has returned to the family home for one last look around before it’s out of his life for good. His mother has died, and with his father and sister also gone, Fletcher is left alone at last to get ride of this bastion of bad experiences and memories. Unfortunately for him, his presence stirs up some otherworldly presences, and Fletcher finds that there are still family secrets to be told – and blame to be assigned.

It’s not a bad story, but it lacks a little something needed to make it more memorable. To me, haunted house stories require a ton of atmosphere to work, and the house in question needs to feel like a character in and of itself. That doesn’t happen in “The Woods Colt,” leaving it a pleasant but largely forgettable read.

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Vincent’s new Dark Tower book is a worthy ‘Companion’

Bev Vincent had a double-tough job in front of him when tackling the writing of The Dark Tower Companion. He had to find compelling new material that would be of value to readers who’ve been reading and studying the series for years, and who’ve had already had access to a comprehensive guidebook in Robin Furth’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance. He also had to find ways to separate this new project from his own book The Road to the Dark Tower.

Fortunately, a lot has happened in the world of the Dark Tower since Stephen King published what was then thought to be the final volume in the series in 2004. Marvel Comics produced several series adapting and expanding material found in King’s Dark Tower books. Hollywood powerhouses Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman hatched an ambitious plan to adapt the material in a series of movies and television programs. And King himself revisited the series with an eighth novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole, a story set between the fourth (Wizard and Glass) and fifth (Wolves of the Calla) books in the series.

This flurry of creative activity provides plenty of fodder for Vincent’s new book, due out on April 2nd from New American Library (and in special editions later this year from Cemetery Dance). Vincent conducted a number of new interviews with the creators behind these new Dark Tower side projects, from artists and writers involved in the comics;  to Howard and Goldsman giving separate interviews on their movie-making plans; to King himself, who discusses these new projects, sheds additional light on several key Dark Tower characters, and touches on his own relationship and approach to the series.

In addition to these interviews, Vincent provides a synopsis of each Dark Tower book, discussing events and characters while saving the major spoilers for a clearly-marked section at the end of each chapter. There’s also a wealth of information on the important “people, places and things” in the series, handily divided into “Mid-World” and “Our World.” Maps, timelines, Mid-World history…you’ll be hard-pressed to find any corner of the Dark Tower mythology that Vincent hasn’t shined a light on.

Books like this are made to be perused, dipped into here and there when a question or confusion about something Dark Tower-related arises. However, Vincent’s open, thoughtful approach to the writing makes it a book that you could easily read cover-to-cover. The material flows in a way that most guidebooks don’t. Vincent’s knowledge of the material is encyclopedic, but his writing style reads nothing like an encyclopedia. It’s incredibly readable, packed with detail and information and insight, and completely approachable. Vincent set out to write something that would appeal to Dark Tower junkies and newbies alike, and in that he has succeeded handily.

Oh, and one more thing – after reading a few pages of material, I was fired up and ready to dive headfirst back into the Dark Tower series again. So, if you pick this book up, make sure your reading schedule is clear – not only are you going to want to absorb every word of Vincent’s book, you’ll likely be stacking up those eight Dark Tower novels right behind it.

Short Story Review: “Alice Through the Plastic Sheet” by Robert Shearman

“Alice Through the Plastic Sheet” by Robert Shearman
From A Book of Horrors edited by Stephen Jones
Cemetery Dance/PS Publishing, 2012

Alan and Alice are a tightly wound couple living in a nice neighborhood. Their next-door neighbors are the kind of neighbors that, once you have them, you hate to lose them. They are quiet and respectful, they keep their yard properly groomed and their conversation to the most polite levels of shallowness and brevity. It’s not hard to live next door to people like that.

Unfortunately for Alan and Alice, the neighbors are moving, and the family that takes their place is the antithesis of everything that was good about the people they’ve replaced. They are mysterious and noisy, and they quickly begin to drive Alice to distraction. She insists one night that Alan go over to intervene, and what he finds is that the people who live next door are nothing like anything they’ve ever encountered.

From that point on, these new neighbors seem hell-bent on torturing Alan and Alice. The play Christmas carols all hours of the day, sometimes the same song on an endless, maddening loop, and always at ear-busting volume. As they unpack their belongings they toss cardboard boxes and styrofoam pieces out into their yard, where it drifts into Alan and Alice’s place like snow.

The stress of the situation quickly crumbles the careful routine that Alan and Alice (and their son and dog) have always lived by. The stress causes fractures in their marriage and at Alan’s job; and the fact that the police seem to take pure joy in ignoring their complaints only worsens the situation.

Robert Shearman’s story is at times an achingly real examination of the strains and breaks that can occur in the wake of the slightest shift in a relationship, whether it’s between neighbors or between spouses. At other times it’s a surreal, nightmarish narrative with its own twisted, borderline insane logic. Are the neighbors real, or are they some sort of manifestation of the pressure that Alan and Alice feel to keep up what is clearly a facade of a partnership? Are their actions justified, or the acts of people who’d crossed the line of sanity long ago and are just now realizing it? I know what I think, but the beauty of a story like this is that you might thing something completely different, and yet we both could be absolutely right.

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Short Story Review: “Interrogation” by Richard Christian Matheson

“Interrogation” by Richard Christian Matheson
From The Devil’s Coattails edited by Jason Brock and William F. Nolan
Cycatrix Press, 2011

Jokes end in punch lines. Flash fiction often ends in a punch – a final stinger of a sentence that brings the story home. “Interrogation” has just such a line, and while it may draw a chuckle from the reader, it will likely be of the uneasy, I-shouldn’t-laugh-but-I’m-laughing variety.

Richard Christian Matheson wrings maximum impact from a minimal word count, telling a complete story with a sharp twist in a fraction of the space that other, lesser stories fill. It would take me even less time to spoil the whole thing, which I absolutely refuse to do. Reading “Interrogation” for yourself will take roughly the same amount of time to read as this review, and it will be infinitely more rewarding. Let’s leave it at that.

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Review: ‘Seduction of the Innocent’ by Max Allan Collins

From its lurid cover (another stellar effort by Hard Case Crime regular Glen Orbik) to its over-the-top title and scandalous premise, Seduction of the Innocent would appear to be a book as extreme as the comics that figure heavily in its plot.

It’s not. And while that may be something of a letdown it’s a forgivable one, because what you get instead is a solid murder mystery and a fascinating peek into one of the most controversial and misguided smear campaigns in American history.

Author Max Allan Collins uses Dr. Fredric Wertham’s 1954 crusade against comics as the framework for this novel, which he named after Wertham’s own book. (That book, mocked for decades, was recently thoroughly debunked and discredited.) Many of the more sensational elements of Collins’s story – congressional hearings on the evils of comics, mob ties to the funnybook business, drunken brawls and suicidal creators – are based on actual events that took place during that time, and many of its characters are based on real-life players in that saga.

In addition to these historical figures, Collins brings in a couple of his own creations – Jack Starr and his stepmother, Maggie, previously featured in the novels A Killing in Comics and Strip for Murder. Like Seduction, the previous Starr books lift their plots from real stories of the early days of comics (think ripped-off artists and feuding creators), making this the third chapter in a loose history of the medium.

The Starrs aren’t in the comic book business; rather, their company, Starr Syndicate, places comic strips in newspapers all over the country. Maggie runs the company, but Jack’s job may be the more difficult one – given that the artists are a moody lot, it’s Jack’s job to head off trouble when he can, and to extricate his talent from their messes when he can’t.

The Starrs’ comic strip business is deeply intertwined with the comic book business, so when a prominent player in the growing controversy stirred by Dr. Werner Frederick’s book Ravage the Lambs ends up dead, Jack finds himself embroiled in an investigation that encompasses several of his associates. The death doesn’t occur until halfway through the book, but Collins uses the ample lead time to flesh out the characters and lay out some of the fascinating and complicated inner workings of the comic book industry. The rest of the novel is spent shadowing Jack as he tries to find out who committed the murder and how he might minimize the effect it has on his company and the business overall.

While you don’t have to be a fan of comics or a student of that particular era of the business to enjoy Seduction, those who meet that criteria are going to find an extra layer of goodness in its pages. It’s hard to imagine society reaching that level of hysteria in today’s climate (well, in relation to comics, anyway, since comics, like all things geek, are in vogue these days), but Collins draws a vivid portrait of the uproar the country was in at the time – an uproar efficiently whipped up by one man and a handful of carefully manipulated “facts.” Into this he mixes an intriguing murder mystery and a colorful cast of characters. The result is thoroughly entertaining page-turner, and another win for Hard Case Crime.

Short Story Review: “Cattiwampus” by Steve Rasnic Tem

“Cattiwampus” by Steve Rasnic Tem
From The Devil’s Coattails edited by Jason Brock and William F. Nolan
Cycatrix Press, 2011

“I never seen a cat fight back like Ma,” says the narrator of Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Cattiwampus.” Her Ma is actually fighting back against her Pa, an abusive man who finally pushes too far. They’ve fought before, but Ma has always been able to keep herself in check. This one last time, though, she loses control, and as a result she’s forced to gather up her children and go into hiding.

Ma is no ordinary woman. She’s a shapeshifter, and she’s lived her life in fear of two things: losing control, and passing her curse down to her children. Now she’s done the first thing, and as the family ekes out an existence in the harsh wilderness of the Appalachians, signs are beginning to appear that she may have done the second thing, too.

Tem based this story on an actual Appalachian folktale, and he maintains that sense of place here with his vivid descriptions and liberal use of the vernacular. I love it when talented authors take on folktales and legends, and Tem takes this simple, common premise and wrings something special out of it.

More reviews from The Devil’s Coattails.

*A little background on Short Story Reviews, and why I’m doing them this way*