Fiction Shorts

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Published: Oct 4, 2006

 By Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore's Alligator is engaging, but like the reptile that graces the cover, her prose is wily and biting. Moore's narrative, weaving among six central characters in St. John's, Newfoundland, flows along sedately at first, lulling the reader into a sense of security. But St. John's is not, apparently, the sleepy town Moore initially leads you to believe. Nay, it is more akin to Ignatius J. Reilly's New Orleans, hot dog stand and all.

Moore's attention to detail brings about a vibrant set of characters without unnecessarily bogging down the story. She focuses on the most important detail at just the right time. Like a Canadian Hemingway (only without the chauvinism), she deftly takes a single sentence and makes it mean as much as a paragraph.

Beverly, a widowed housewife, recalls that at his death, her husband David had a receipt in his pocket. "He'd had two draft beer and a cheeseburger at The Keg, bought a New Yorker, which was open to a story by Arthur Miller."

The progressively punchier chapters are named for and follow the six characters; from Frank the young street vendor and Colleen the teenage environmentalist to Beverly's sister Madeline and the Russian thug Valentin, Moore deftly tears through the faults of their past to create a cast of characters for whom the reader walks the line between detest and endearment. She brings to the forefront a distinct aspect of humanity that, by the end, you can't help but admire in each of them.

True, Alligator may get a bit sappy and nostalgic at times. However, despite only a month of time passing in the novel, Moore makes the experience of St. John's, Newfoundland, a memorable one, and it's as if the characters become much more than the 300 pages could have ever imparted.

—Lou Perseghin

By Robert Ward

Until now, Robert Ward was best known as the author of the classic working man's novel Red Baker (1985), and for his work on such television dramas as Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice. For a new group of readers, however, he will be known as the writer of Four Kinds of Rain, an intriguingly dark and delightful noir novel.

Bob Wells is a psychologist in Baltimore, serving the poor and downtrodden. His patients include a lot of single moms on welfare and homeless vets. He seldom makes a dime, but for this grizzled old activist, that's OK. As he sees it, Bob is the last man in town who never sold out.

Still, even a committed radical like Bob has bills to pay. Such is his desperation that when a paying client — a wealthy art dealer with paranoid delusions — finally comes along, the doctor loses his head a little, and starts to forget his instincts.

Bob's greed only magnifies when he meets a woman, the new lead singer of his classic rock band. She's a great gal and they really hit it off. The only problem is, she refuses to have anything to do with a man who's broke.

Clearly Bob needs money. And his new patient has a fortune in rare art. This lucky convergence inevitably leads Bob down a very dark path to larceny, betrayal and, ultimately, murder.

Four Kinds of Rain is as black as a chain smoker's lungs, but it's also deviously funny, as Ward takes us into the mind of this very human, but very messed-up man. The plot is twisted and suspenseful, but it's the wonderfully original characters that really bring it all to life. Welcome back, Mr. Ward. We missed you.

—David J. Montgomery

 By Ryan Boudinot

Imagine the dry but daft humor of John Hodgman's little essays crosscut with Stephen Leacock's richly dreary nonsensical stories. Rip any notion of PC gentility from its pages. Add a dash of Chuck Klosterman's incisiveness (rare, I know). That's where Boudinot's weird science is heading. Only he's better and more diverse.

A strong, tight writer with a squinting eye for detailed characterizations and their dippy, thought-bubbling imaginations — all within plain-jane settings — this McSweeney's contributor and former student of Rick Moody has produced a most righteous volume of twisted witty short stories.

Whether it's kids of the future having to off their parents (with their consent, no less) in "Civilization," or sniveling yuppie couples stuck in their own neuroses in "On Sex and Relationships," Boudinot takes the easily relatable and kicks out its crutches. But Boudinot is never cloying or dully snarky. No word or sentiment is out of place. There's stupidity and violence afoot and scads of anger, too — but rude consequences at every turn. Like the thoroughly uncomfortable "Newholly" and its take on a Somalian refugee beating her kids. What will the Caucasian next-door neighbors do? While the title story about a fourth-grade boy's unfortunate Halloween costume (and his classmate's "Anne Frank" outfit) has been riding the Internet for some time, it's no less a joy to see and hear again. The harsh hilarity of "Hitler" makes it (like most of Boudinot's shorts) a must-reread. Besides, it sets us up for his other Halloween tale, "Absolut Boudinot," a blunt, snotty take on smalltime terrorist activity whose characters puff up with roosterish pride at having missed the obvious.

This is a must-read.

—A.D. Amorosi

 By Gideon Defoe

There aren't many books as ridiculous as the Pirates! series by Gideon Defoe. In his latest, The Pirates! In an Adventure With Communists, the revered but bungling pirate captain sets out to transport Karl Marx to Paris, after being jailed as a Marx lookalike. On his adventure, the captain and his unnamed crew encounter doting salon owners, wax figurine connoisseurs and opera-writer-turned-bear-thief Richard Wagner. Not to mention "moider," as the pirate from the Bronx calls it.

Defoe slides easily between 1840 and today, as the pirate captain bemoans the fact that at a showing of Cats!, they had cornettos, but at Marx's speech, there were only three kinds of ice cream. His footnotes, 34 in total, are hilarious, observing, for instance, that Thomas Aquinas wrote about eight million words in his lifetime, or 260 pirate books.

Pirates! is a slim book, easily breezed through in an afternoon. It is silly almost to the point of excess. When it is revealed that Karl Marx lives the life o' leisure because it is his "burden" and the pirates double-park their boat in the harbor because "that kind of behavior is pretty much the whole point of being a pirate," you almost want to groan out loud.

Reading Pirates!, you can't help but get the feeling that the pirates live a lifestyle more akin to the lost footage from the Village People's "In the Navy" video. More concerned with his luxuriant beard and whether he is in style with the season's hottest piratewear, the captain cuts a less than imposing figure. However, he and his crew make for an interesting, albeit a bit foppish, read.

—Lou Perseghin

By William Boyd

A masterful novel of intrigue and espionage, Restless propels readers through a "bitter dark current of fear" as Sally Gilmartin involves her daughter Ruth in a campaign to settle a decades-old score — for she suspects someone is trying to kill her.

Apparently, Sally is not quite the "peaceful, unexceptional" mother Ruth always thought she was. As she reveals in a series of alternating chapters titled "The Story of Eva Delectorskaya," Sally is actually a Russian recruit named Eva, who became an agent for the British Secret Service circa 1940. Her experiences unfold in gripping chapters that are more exciting than the contemporary narrative. As she works toward her agency's goal of getting America involved in the war against Germany, Eva soon realizes that she herself may have been set up. Boyd peppers Restless with intriguing details that build tension throughout. Sequences depicting the beautiful young woman learning the spy game and all of its rules — e.g., the three reasons why a man will betray his country (blackmail, money, revenge); and to never trust anyone, ever — are engrossing. And when Boyd suggests that Eva perhaps failed to pay close attention to these rules, the real suspense begins. Various episodes of double- and triple-crosses will leave readers questioning the truth, and a sequence in which Eva dispatches one of her victims with a sharp implement is incredibly vivid.

Restless is often as thrilling as it is disturbing. Even if the contemporary scenes are less enthralling, they too have an undercurrent of unease. Boyd, always an impressive author, fills his historical novel with ideas about how well we know people, and how individuals cope during times of crisis and bravery. And like Eva on a mission, the narrative jinks, weaves and backtracks to its final, startling revelation.

Restless will leave readers breathless.

—Gary M. Kramer

The premise is a good one: Two drifters find each other in the most unlikely place, and try to grow roots together. But that's where the good of Running Away with Frannie ends. As soon as Frannie and Sam step out of the dive where they meet, the book spins into a mess of predicable cliches and flowery language more overblown than roses past their peak.

Frannie is waiting tables at a West Virginia truck stop where Sam stops to eat after moving out of his childhood home — again. At 25, he's attended five colleges in five states, and is prone to taking off whenever he feels the need. Frannie has no roots or attachment aside from three garbage bags full of her life, and after she's fired for flushing a potato down the men's room toilet, she hitches a ride with Sam to his next stop. Sam is drawn to Frannie, who is supposed to be a glittery enigma with a wretched past, a butterfly who can't be caged no matter how hard Sam tries.

But she's not a glittery enigma. She's more like Rita, the mentally challenged character played by Charlize Theron in the final season of Arrested Development . Like Rita, Frannie makes no sense, but she isn't written as a comedic character on purpose. Even for someone with a mental illness, which Frannie clearly is, her actions, from where she works to how she dresses to how she speaks, are not consistent. Yes, she's had a terrible past, but it's not enough to explain any kind of method to her madness, and around her, the book falls apart.

Sam himself is a well-worn stereotype, dying father and family feud included. He's painted as the calm of Frannie's storm, a man seduced by the siren, though she does little to inspire witty dialogue. "I don't know anymore," he says. "Except that somehow I ended up standing on a fault line and I'm married to an earthquake."

It's not hard to figure out how this story ends, but the downward slide is painful. Maybe if Frannie weren't so misshapen, or Sam too bland of a cliche-speaking protagonist, Running Away With Frannie could be saved. Too bad they left that diner. Staying would have saved them the narrative tumble.

—Jen Miller

"After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper." And so begins a long descent into the mind of the murderer, Edward Glyver (aka Edward Glapthorn and several other aliases). I expected it to be like a Dickens' novel, if Dickens had written on acid. Indeed, the narrator spends a good deal of time in the sordid opium dens of London, in a drugged stupor, before being chased into the dark streets by "The Iron Master," his imagined deity. "I was used to living on the night-side of things," says Glyver. I figured this would be one of those novels that turns the Dickensian novel on its head, or more appropriately, rips open its belly to show us the reeking innards that lie beneath the smooth surface. This would be Dickens as written by Rob Zombie. But I was pleasantly surprised to find a novel much more conventional than that, but no less thrilling (and I don't really want Rob Zombie writing novels). 

Cox has written a neo-Victorian, gothic page-turner in the vein of the serialized sensationalist novels of the 19th century. It is a lot more akin to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White than to any Dickens novel (although the grim London and twisted machinations of Bleak House come close). The Meaning of Night borders on pastiche in its construction. The names of characters have that preposterous Victorian flare: Josiah Pluckrose, Phoebus Rainsford Daunt, and my favorite, Fordyce Jukes. There is a faux preface written by a J.J. Antrobus, Professor of Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction. The conceit of the novel is that it is a found manuscript and the text comes complete with footnotes by Antrobus (although Cox doesn't fully exploit the playful possibilities of these footnotes in the way that Susanna Clarke did in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell). However, all these elements never outshine his wild plot and gloriously realized settings.

The treat of the novel is that it doesn't pretend to be more than it is, a sensationalist page-turner, and it delivers on almost all counts. I have trouble giving examples of what I found most engrossing or delightful because I would not want to spoil any of the plot's intricacies. The plot is like a wicked tree in a bewitched forest, slowly wrapping its branches around an unsuspecting reader, its roots rising from the earth like tendrils to trap its victims. And best of all, the narrator is a paranoid, psychotic murderer. What more fun do you want from a book on a cold, autumnal night?

—Edward Pettit

 

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