Richard Thomas’s eSingle “Victimized” reads like a vignette from Sin City— concise, dark, and comfy as a broken rib. Set in dystopian future where the legal system has turned into a kind of auxiliary blood sport, “Victimized” is a breathless revenge fantasy beyond the reach of morality.

In this future, defendants in violent crime cases are given a choice: take your chances before a jury, or step into the ring. If you choose the ring, your opponent– if anyone even shows at all– will be someone hurt by the crime in question. Someone with good reason to take you apart. Grieving fathers, angry husbands. A scenario like this lends itself well to gambling, and there’s plenty of it. The smart money’s usually on Michael— a legend. Michael steps into the ring when nobody else does, ensuring the scumbags don’t get a free pass back into the real world.

Belle isn’t exactly the smart money. She’s a woman, first of all— you don’t see many women in these proceedings. She’s also a victim. Or, she was, anyway—now she’s more like a vampire; vaguely remembering what it was to be human while feeding off of the very pain she struggled with for so long. She’s been planning a long time to face off against the man who has wronged her: Jon, her uncle. It’s smartly kept in the shadows of the story what Jon did to Belle that got him thrown into prison, but it’s nonetheless presented in clear enough focus to make your skin crawl.

This is the trend throughout “Victimized”: to attack the reader with unblinking frankness wrapped in bleak noir homilies. The descriptions are as harrowing outside the ring as they are in it. Indeed, this reads like a graphic novel—vividly wrought details and characters who parade their psyches around like war-torn flags. Belle is sketched in equal parts depth and deed, but it shouldn’t be a spoiler to fans of the genre that the resolution in “Victimized”— if there even is one—is as ambivalent as it is gruesome. Thomas is a smart writer— he knows his story doesn’t need an ending. Neither does a punch, in reality. All that matters is that you had the stones to throw it.

“Victimized” is available for your eReader or PC here.

Out of Touch by Brandon Tietz is a new entry into the arms race of transgressive literature, informally reignited by Chuck Palahniuk a decade or so ago. It’s an increasingly dysphoric genre; moral bankruptcy is the new black. One wonders how deep into pure unfeeling we can descend before there’s no earth left to move. Yet here is a book with a rather elegant twist: Tietz binds his narrator, Aidin, so literally to the typical themes of the genre– abandonment; addiction; intense family dysfunction– that he is inextricable from them.

You see, Aidin can’t feel a thing.  Literally. He suffers a condition that’s allegorical in the way it’s heralded by the shoddy quality of his character. In other words, he asked for it, and the punishment seems to fit the crime: up until the point of the big numb, as he calls it, Aidin has lived his life as a womanizer and an addict. To his credit he’s never really pretended to be anything else. It wasn’t always this way, of course. At the outset we don’t exactly know the sudden cause of his condition; it could be a result of Aidin’s pharmacological excesses, or as laid upon him from without like some righteous, punitive blight.  Any way you look at it, in a case like this, rebuilding yourself anew isn’t really a choice; it isn’t some desperate vogue— it’s a medical necessity.

When we first meet Aidin, he appears to be a person without boundaries. He has money; he has resources. He lives without answering to anyone– his parents are barely-there entities– and is unapologetic about getting exactly what he wants out of life, though there is always a subtle undercurrent of revulsion in his monologues that he’s never quite able to dismiss. He lives to consume; to be a fixture of the nightlife. Night after night, Aidin frequents exclusive clubs and gets a private table and lets the world come to him. He has a drug habit free of both passion and fear. He gets any girl he comes across without even trying– they know him. If they don’t know him, they know the idea of him. He is Versace and Cristal and cocaine. He is too single-minded to schmooze; he doesn’t care for conversation and doesn’t crave acceptance. Words like need and desire are a bit old-fashioned to Aidin; he has, in fact, modernized Maslow’s hierarchy of needs into something like a short, flat line.

 He’s been this way for a very long time. Emotionally abandoned by his parents, educated in sex and drugs by private school peers that make the young droogs of A Clockwork Orange, by comparison, seem sort of friendly, Aidin has learned to ignore in himself those signifying characteristics—compassion, for example— that distinguish a human being from, say, an ashtray. He’s not an evil person. He’s simply waiting to be filled.

While Aidin’s excesses might once have been a defense mechanism to disguise his insecurities, that nuance has eroded away and life has become something of a listless experiment in gluttony. It is one morning, after one such night of double-fisted debauchery, that he is stricken: Aidin wakes and finds he has no sensation whatsoever. He can’t feel the floor. He can’t feel the cold spilling out of the refrigerator, or the touch of a can of lemonade to his lips. He writes this off as a particularly bad hangover from all the previous night’s drugs, but as he continues without success to try and generate any kind of sensation, panic takes over. He tries cocaine– nothing. What about pain, he wonders? One way to find out. He sends away the girls still sleeping in his bed from the night before and, in privacy, as safely as possible, tries a knife against his skin. Things get messy, but still, no feeling. Nothing.

Aidin comes into the care of Dr. Paradies, a progressive therapist who breaks the news that there is no cure for his condition. Largely because his condition is a metaphor; no matter how hard I attempt to accept the particulars of Aidin’s situation to the extent they are described—no pain, no sense of temperature, and seemingly no discriminative or light touch whatsoever— I can’t help thinking that without any sensation at all, without being able to feel the resistance of the floor against your feet, your muscles unable to sense the tension required to keep the body erect, one would immediately collapse into a heap and that would be it. As Aidin finds, when the body is deprived of one sense, the others attempt to compensate, and soon he is able to master locomotion through a kind of practiced repetition of movements and awareness of his environment. Physically, it’s the best he can hope for.  He’s just going to have to cope. This doesn’t really suit Aidin; here is an addictive personality whose addictions have been cruelly snatched from him. Drugs no longer have any effect on him, so what good is taking them? He doesn’t get high. He can’t feel hunger. He can’t even tell when he has to take a shit.

After some initial misguided attempts to integrate, Aidin receives some much-needed structure in the form of a list, created by Dr. Paradies— 366 items, intended to wean him from his now unquenchable appetites. The items on the list are divided into sections which almost mirror the developmental stages of a child, albeit accelerated; Aidin advances once more through the mastery of motor, cognitive, and social skills. Simple arts-and-crafts projects; appreciation of music; interpersonal encounters (without the intent of ending in meaningless sex). Some items in the list read rather transparently like an author-penned love letter to the arts— still, it’s satisfying to watch Aidin’s addictive personality reforged as he flies through the list in scenes both funny and poignant. It’s a big part of the book, and one of its constant joys.

Naturally, things complicate. One of Paradies’ list items involves meeting a girl named Dana— mysterious, jaded, and beautiful. She’s also blind. Aidin forms a relationship with her the quality of which he was probably incapable before being afflicted with his condition. It seems his life is becoming stable at last when the list items start to become surreal and strange— up until now, every item seemed to reveal some hidden talent or signs of a dormant intelligence. Since the big numb, it seems Aidin has even fewer boundaries; he is good at everything and does not tire, making him a veritable superman. But now the tasks he is being asked to complete no longer have any apparent benefit; they are abstract and sinister, seeming designed to test his pliability. But no matter how deeply Aidin looks into his own motivations for continuing in the surreal final chapters of his therapy, he finds he is unable to walk away. He has to finish the list. It has become his new drug; the only one he’s able to feel. The question is, what will happen once it’s finished? Will he be able to carry on without someone telling him exactly what to do?

Out of Touch is a book that does not shy from its influences— overtly namedropped within in some form or another are Ellis, Palahniuk, Welsh, and Selby, Jr. Palahniuk may not be the senior man from this list, but his is the most identifiable fingerprint— the mantras (“Everyone is at least two people”), the unflinching confessional bent, the themes of damaged men finding themselves in the sudden grip of strange therapy. These guys write of self-destruction and addiction and wrackful consumption; of fragile egos disguised as runaway trains; of characters who pull you in by driving you away. Tietz deals with these devices no less adeptly than those who have cut the path before him.

In terms of the prose itself, Tietz is a formidable writer. He’s got an excellent rhythm for language and his style is crystal clear. He’s most exciting, though, when he’s able to break rank with the familiar conventions of transgressive fiction and strike out on his own in unexpected directions, as in one lengthy passage early on, describing one of Aidin’s nights at the ultra-exclusive nightclub Hush: it’s a terrific slab of words. An excoriating vignette of the nightclub scene and the supplicants thereto, shown as a virtually interchangeable collection of mannequins having capitulated their collective self respect to the point they suffer a sameness so total it’s like staring into a pit of churning lead. Another highlight later on in the story involves an unblinking flashback to Aidin’s nihilistic youth at Penbrooke Academy; a series of recollections detailing his first uncertain steps into the desert of  manhood. It’s a passage both funny and devastating, as abhorrent as it is true.

This is part of the appeal to Tietz’s work as opposed to lesser writers who might overlook the heart under the transgressive appeal; it’s easy to blow something up. To destroy it. You don’t even need a writer for this— society, as a whole, has got this pretty down pat. The art is in the act of rebuilding, a task at which both author and narrator perform admirably. Aidin’s understanding of his personal failings provides much of the light and shadow in the story, of which there is no shortage. Aidin is not as one dimensional as he might first appear, and, deprived of his vices, he’s given ample room to evolve.

Until the reigns are taken from him. The novel’s climax finds Aidin discovering the true aim of Dr. Paradies’ list, and the secret of his development. It changes things dramatically. The revelations contained therein could’ve easily filled another hundred pages or even more; but it’s not to be. While Aidin’s transformation into his final incarnation is icily cool in its execution, the surrounding details raise a few more questions than they answer.  The story’s ouroboric twist— almost seeming prescribed by the genre itself as opposed to growing naturally from the situation— comes off as a bit hasty, though it’s not without its pleasures. Among them, the details surrounding the resolution of Aidin and Dana’s relationship, and the surreal lack of a ceiling to Aidin’s aptitudes. His life after is not what you would expect; despite his apparent new lease on life, many more doors have closed than have opened.

In the end, Aidin’s story is less about reclaiming moral decency, or chasing freedom– from your past, from your parents, from the things that bind you. It’s more about playing the part that’s been written for you. We are nothing but a product of our experiences, no matter how it’s dressed up. Even if everyone is, in fact, two people, we are still only the two people we are taught to be.

Some fairly prominent elements of Stephen Prosapio’s Dream War might seem familiar; for example, the concept of cutting-edge technology that allows trained operatives to invade other peoples’ dreams in order to ferret out hidden information, or even to plant new information, all to nefarious ends.

If this sounds like a rip-off of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, wait: Prosapio’s copyright on Dream War is from 2007, predating the film by three years. And furthermore, it’s only in the practical machinery of the dream-link concept that Prosapio’s novel resembles Nolan’s film. The sum products diverge wildly. From one seed, two stories.

Dream War is a genre-bending thriller; from the raw elements of speculative sci fi, Prosapio crafts a doomsday tale whose origins might be older than the earth itself– a tale that is, at last, reaching its terrible climax. Dream War is nothing if not ambitious; it spans continents. It spans centuries. It doesn’t even stay rooted in a single dimension.

A brief introduction to the story gives the reader a crash course in the ontology of dreams and dreaming throughout history and, by extension, the science behind dream invasion; we’re told that the legendary Spartacus divined from a dream the exact time to initiate his slave revolt. Is this of consequence in the 21st century? More specifically, is it possible a man’s dreams are more than just an arbitrary assemblage of images?

The CIA thinks so. Enough to fund a shell organization known as the OIA (Oneirology Institute of America), an organization whose research results in the NOCTURN device— a device via which one can remotely (via satellite) enter into another’s dreams. The CIA, naturally, can’t resist the idea of knowing the enemy’s thoughts. To that end, they recruit a CIA operative— Hector Lopez— to lead an exciting new campaign in counter-terrorism. They train Lopez in the extraction of information from unwilling subjects, and they teach him to manipulate his surroundings inside the dream. His superiors, however, are in deeper than that. Lopez learns it’s possible to drive a man to kill from inside his dream; even to commit suicide. What more effective way to deal with terrorists than to coax them to off one another?

But even this grim agenda is but the work of amateurs. After one of the counter-terrorism missions goes bad, Lopez encounters an unknown consciousness in a dream; one which appears to comprehend the nature of the OIA’s work with startling clarity, and recognizes Lopez’s talent for navigating the dream world. This is Luzveyn Dred. Another dream-spy? With that name, unlikely. Dred is something different; he inhabits a place called the Spatium Quartus— literally, the fourth dimension— which runs parallel to ours, a place that can be accessed via the act of dreaming. Dred has the power to summon people here from their dreams. In their waking lives, the dreamers remember this as a nightmare. Or at least that’s what they hope.

Flash forward. The tenuous OIA has been officially dismantled in the wake of public failure. Lopez, however, carries on his missions largely on his own, driven by guilt and personal demons, and aided by the chance acquisition of a medallion that seems to protect him from Dred’s influence. But this isn’t the only medallion, we soon learn. There are many. But who has them, and what is their significance?

From here, the story takes us to Naples where we follow Drew and Nadia, a couple on vacation. Drew discovers one of the aforementioned medallions in his suitcase. Dred has a plan to escape the Spatium Quartus— albeit a leisurely one, as it seems, judging from the exposition, to have been initiated at least a hundred years before Christ— and through Drew’s possession of this medallion, he, Nadia, and Nadia’s daughter, Alexis, have been unwittingly drawn into the line of fire. In fact, Drew’s life is about to be derailed by Dred’s minions— members of an Italian terrorist group/Luzveyn Dred cult called Sogno di Guerra. Their operatives are on Drew’s tail, and they want his medallion back.

Now, wait: Dred’s people have seemingly sunk a lot of manpower into stealing this particular medallion. This is a little baffling considering the method by which it comes into Drew’s possession in the first place (to reveal much more would be a spoiler; one character’s task is to collect the medallions and land them into the hands of the Sogno di Guerra– Dred’s earthly foot soldiers– in Naples. The method by which this is done in the case of Drew’s medallion seems stunningly impractical, especially given that certain characters are able to send and retrieve tangible items through dream-link without the hassle of  physical proximity). This incongruity is one of a few instances where the finer points of the rules Prosapio has devised in this fictional world get in the way of the story; it’s easy in sci fi to get hung up on the cleverness of how a thing is done and, in the process, losing track of why it is done.

That said, Prosapio’s story is imaginative and intricate, with many levels of interest; the secret history of Spartacus, and how it factors into the current-day events, is fascinating; the CIA lingo feels authentic; and, from a purely descriptive point of view, the scenes set in Italy— and the shadowy developments therein— are often excellent. Here, Prosapio’s language is at its most confident and precise.

With its duality of worlds concept, Dream War bears some similarity to Stephen King and Peter Straub’s horror staple The Talisman, and, likewise, its plot is built on a hidden mythology that we discover along with the characters. While this richens the story, the sheer breadth of Dream War‘s mythology also sets the stage for moments of cumbersome (but necessary) exposition. Nonetheless,  Dream War is often gripping on a level that is visceral. There is no deeper message, and no need for one: Prosapio weaves together the disparate threads of science fiction, espionage, historical fiction and even a touch of Christian mythology into an ambitious, well-paced story. A few grating elements aside– Lopez’s predilection for ham-fisted 80s action-hero quips being chief among them– Dream War is a fun, exuberant thriller that’s not afraid to take chances.

Buy Dream War at Smashwords

www.prosapio.com

Casual brutality, sex, and disorder: the heroes of noir have never been terribly endearing to the heart, but the seven nihilistic souls of Richard Thomas’s Transubstantiate seem like they were born ruined, and are likely to die that way. The story draws heavily on all the beloved accouterments of the neo-noir tradition— fractured narratives; cynicism; disorientation; ruthless beatings— but the story branches out into other areas, exploring themes of mysticism and the unknowable, even broaching the peripheral terrors of Lovecraftian horror.

We follow our seven characters over the course of events in both real time and in flashbacks as they struggle for survival in the throes of exponentially-worsening disasters. If it’s bad, it likely gets worse. Most of these people started off as convicted murderers; those were the good old days. There’s the man who poisoned his cheating wife (Jacob); the woman whose sexuality seems to lead to someone’s death just as often as gratification (Marcy); the ex-cop who carries out murders he considers “just” (Gordon). It all catches up to them, and soon our incarcerated antiheroes are thrown together and given what appears to be a second chance when they are chosen for a rehabilitation program on a remote island—except, it’s not a rehabilitation program. It’s a shadowy experiment. And how often do those turn out well?

Soon, a virus has swept over the planet, killing off most of humanity. That’s not quite the bad news. With the world now in ruins, no one is at the wheel and society has run amok: bloodthirsty tribes and mad dogs roam the cities, and those not wishing to be killed (or worse) are forced to seek out safety underground. Meanwhile, back on the island, the situation is no less hopeless. Our characters, who have been forced at gunpoint by their captors to run a mock society and play pretend for the benefit of island newcomers, have but two options. Neither is terribly appealing: A) Escape to the mainland, the barbaric state of which they do not fully comprehend, or B) Remain on the island– a paradise, except that it is essentially an elaborate prison camp (hey, at least you can steal a view of the beach— though do so at your own risk), and that the experiment in which they are trapped seems to have become a headless nightmare.

What is happening? The virus, the experiment, the charade on the island; is someone watching it all transpire, pulling the strings? That may be the character known as Assigned. The chief antagonist, Assigned’s narrative thread is largely represented by nothing but a chilling readout of computer language and script logs; an abandoned program grown sentient, or something worse. Assigned is watching every move that’s made on island, but who (or what) is it? A program gone haywire, or the tangible shard of some alien consciousness? Was mankind in collusion with dark forces? The character known as X seems to have an idea. In fact, he may even have been one such force; a manipulative mystic, spiritually (but not morally) enlightened, possibly inhuman, and acting as something of a psychic warden at the behest of those running the experiment. Willingly, of course. X is furthering his own agenda; this makes him somewhat detached from the plight of mankind, despite that he’s probably the best shot it now has for survival. His powers are shamanistic in nature— mental projection, healing, divination. His true motives are unclear. Is X an agent for humanity’s evolution, or the harbinger of its collapse?

Though the plot is a veritable straitjacket of mysteries, the telling is lean, even spare: this book is brisk, wicked, and blood-soaked. In fact, the story reads much like a 200-page climax– Thomas’s writing is always on the move, always frantic, surging forward essentially without pause, all while maintaining an intricate weave of narrative threads with deceptive ease. Our heroes may play to a familiar type–  they are selfish avengers, benumbed by blood and tragedy into a final, jagged archetype of skewed morality that goes unchallenged by even the most earthshaking developments– but the backdrop of sci-fi pulp keeps everything fresh and unpredictable: otherworldly shock troops materialize out of thin air. Teleportation devices lie hidden in caves. Microchip implants. Ancient relics. Anthropomorphic animals. There is, in fact, a sense that the plot machinery of Transubstantiate runs deep, and has likely ground up many lost souls before these. In a way, this validates its corrosive noir cynicism. The story’s true depth and scope are likely known only to X, and he’s not exactly the sharing type. And so the cause of it all lies largely outside the reach of the unenlightened.

Still, the theme of biological evolution appears more than once during the course of the story. It’s suggested that human potential has not been reached, and it’s implied that the powerful X may be using the island and its inhabitants to engineer his own Eden– a vision of the future of humanity, of what it could become. If that’s the case– if these survivors are destined to evolve– let’s hope they learn to control their ids a bit. As it stands, it seems like one X per planet may be enough.

Follow Richard Thomas @ whatdoesnotkillme.com

Buy Transubstantiate from Otherworld Publications

Bret Easton Ellis burst onto the literary scene in 1985 with his debut novel, Less Than Zero. Less Than Zero was born smack-dab in the middle of the Reagan 80’s, a time of debauchery and decadence shrouded in a Cold War haze; the dawning of the era where the self-indulgent I would obliterate the once-united We into exile. MTV was in its infancy and Betamax was promising technology.  Clay, Less Than Zero’s protagonist, had a problem merging on freeways, and couldn’t seem to shake the implications of an overbearing billboard in Los Angeles which read, DISAPPEAR HERE.  Clay’s fellow cast of characters: Blair, Julian, Rip, Trent, and others were just as rich, high, and sex-starved as Clay was, and for them, enough was never enough; they saw, they snorted, and they weren’t apologetic for it.  They were the sons and daughters of Hollywood’s movers and shakers, movie producers, real estate agents, and they had the trust funds to prove it.  This group never really had to concern themselves with anything because everything was always given to them.  Less Than Zero was a perfect novel for imperfect times.  They even made a movie based on the book.

Fitting then that twenty-five years later, Imperial Bedroom, Bret Easton Ellis’s sequel to Less Than Zero opens with the line, “They had made a movie about us.”  It’s an intriguing angle to the daunting task of reacquainting an audience after so much time has passed with characters that helped define a generation, all without the author coming off as hedonistic blowhard bent on trying to recapture the past glory of his famed debut.  And for the most part, Imperial Bedrooms and Bret Easton Ellis avoid that pitfall. One of Ellis’s chief strengths has always been his ability to blur the razor-thin line between fantasy and reality to the point where it’s hard to distinguish between the two; Imperial Bedrooms is no exception.  As the book opens Clay has once again just returned to Los Angeles.  Now a successful screenwriter, he’s back in town to help cast the movie adaptation of his novel, “The Listeners” (a wink to the real-life Ellis collection The Informers anyone?).  He’s convinced his condo is haunted by the ghost of the 8-year old boy who lived there prior, he’s being tailed by a blue Jeep, and he’s getting mysterious text messages saying, amongst other things, “I’m watching you.”  He’s running into the Botoxed ghosts of his past at industry parties around town and they haven’t much changed since the mid-80’s.  Blair is married to Trent, but had an affair with Julian, and Rip is still living off his trust fund.  At one of the parties Clay meets a girl named Rain Turner, “The look is blond and wholesome, mid-western, distinctly American, not what I’m usually into. She’s obviously an actress because girls who look like this aren’t out here for any other reason…” and he’s instantly stricken.  “Do you want to be in a movie?” he asks her, and she responds, “Why? Do you have a movie you want to put me in?”  The seemingly simple encounter starts a chain reaction of events which become the crux of Imperial Bedrooms.  Along the way there is kinky sex, bloated corpses, salacious videos, and coke-induced nosebleeds; this is Hollywood after all.  There’s a bit of the despicable, and just when you think Ellis has reached as far as he can go, he goes farther.  If you’re looking for decency, a sense of morality, and overall likable characters, you’re in the wrong place.  In this world everyone is a narcissistic.  As the last line of the book reads, “I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.”  Sound familiar?

Less Than Zero shocked people when it was published; the book helped show Conservative America what was really going on behind closed doors, whether they liked it or not.  Twenty-five years later, we’re not so easily shocked; everyone has the internet, everyone goes to psychiatrists, and everyone has access to the best prescription meds.  The class system no longer dictates who gets to be a f*!k up; it’s not a rich person’s privilege anymore.  One of the more infamous scenes in Less Than Zero involved the snuff film Clay’s friend paid $15,000 for. Back then a snuff film was a novelty, something you had to happen across or know the “right” person to see.  Not anymore; Hollywood is up to Saw 115 by now and with the film’s producers still rolling in the cash there’s no end in sight. Fiction is no longer scarier than reality.  The characters of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms might be rich, the exterior of their lives might look more like an unscripted version of The Hills than a tale of middle-America.  But is that really the case? Their desires–sex, money, power–and their insecurities are the same as anyone else. Is the social-economic gap, the difference between driving a BMW or a beaten-up Buick, or sleeping with the hot girl or just wishing that you could be sleeping with the hot girl really that big of a canyon? Keep an eye on the Facebook status updates from your friends and ask yourself that question again.

In the end Imperial Bedrooms is a tale of morality, and how one’s definition of what morality means can shape the world around them, as only Bret Easton Ellis can tell it.  Naysayers might ask if Imperial Bedrooms really adds anything new to the story of the characters of Less Than Zero twenty-five years later, and the truth is no, it probably doesn’t.  But how many high school reunions, how many mirrors tell the same picture day after day? That old cliche, “The more things change the more they stay the same,” that’s so true. And perhaps that’s the scary part.  But even so Imperial Bedrooms is one helluva read.

Caleb Ross’ stories do not behoove summaries. Let’s just get that out of the way. Let’s also just say that they contain blood drinking, deformity, death, and disfigurement, to varying degrees. These stories swirl like nightmares: a populace of anti-protagonists so wounded that there is generally no hope for their redemption. The reader acts as sponge, absorbing their pain. Making sense of it. As the reader, you are the first man on the scene; as such, you are to perform the tasks the characters themselves are no longer capable of performing: observe, record, and interpret. Seek your own closure. And be careful to distance yourself from these people, because they’re collapsing stars, and you could be swallowed right along with them. Your job is only to do the above, and to pretend you dont share something universal with each and every one of these poor souls.

Oh, it’s not as dire a task as it sounds. There is true wonder here: Charactered Pieces is a glass menagerie of deformity, a collection of short stories that is utterly fearless in its willingness to spill blood, shock, and soothe. Unlike most horror fiction, you can’t step away and dismiss these stories with simple logic– they do not contain supernatural bogeymen, mad killers or fiends. These stories contain normal people crushed under the wheels of circumstance and the weight of guilt. The characters within are far beyond damaged– they are wrecked. Busted parents and screwed up kids; scarred, ruined, and weighed down with ten tons of remorse and pain wrapped in cancerous silence. Like individual flaws in the same junk diamond, they share some unspeakable pain in one way or another. But all this hurt isn’t dreamt up for the author’s detached amusement, or for the titilliation of some nihlistic reader– this is a bid for communion where it is needed most. In each story the characters’ struggles are the result of some long-incubated despair, intimate and undeniable as a deathbed rasp. Come close. Listen: that the main character in The Camel of Morocco— an architect tortured by guilt after the collapse of a mosque on which he performed renovations— could reach the course of action that he does with the reader’s suspension of disbelief intact is a small miracle, if miracle is the word. These characters cry for empathy. You will be tested on whether you can abide.

This isn’t shock for the sake of shock. This isn’t to get a rise out of you; this isn’t a museum of cruelty. There is never the sense that Ross is toying with you, manipulating your sympathies. On the contrary, like a synthesis of Raymond Carver’s ability to paint in 100 shades of grey and Chuck Palahniuk’s reckless abandon for the limits of taste, Charactered Pieces is an honest look at the darkness that humans both create and endure; a catharsis by way of misery, sweating out the toxins. Apparently even pain can be beautiful– what else could explain feeling even remotely upbeat, as I did, at the end of the eponymously-titled first story Charactered Pieces, witnessing the main character lovingly painting the semi-formed toenails of an unborn fetus? Yeah. Out of context it sounds over-the-top, but withinin the context of the story it’s an act that is as loving as it is surreal.

Fathers fail; buildings collapse; people visit unending pain on themselves and their loved ones. Love. The word sounds unreachable, like a star whose death we haven’t yet recorded but whose light is still visible. Refracted through Ross’ prose— at turns both brutal and poetic— it can yield understanding. Maybe even hope. Like a collection of photos of our absolute worst moments, Charactered Pieces works to dull the edge of suffering through exposure; toughening the spirit, leading us into and through the places we fear. Though maybe we shouldn’t leap to conclusions on that hope business: “The wind sounds like wind,” closes The Camel of Morocco. The implication is that our guilt, however crushing, is to be dealt with. We are perhaps on our own.

Caleb’s website: www.calebjross.com

“Edgewater was once a pretty normal ‘burb,” writes Drew Ballard, the narrator of Major Inversions. “Now, everyone you meet is in the process of becoming something.” This little seaside town has undergone some growing pains in the past couple of years. It is the suburb of what is becoming a burgeoning film town, the Hollywood of the eastern seaboard: Wilmington, North Carolina. It might not have Hollywood’s platinum sparkle, but movies get made in Wilmington, and everyone wants to get a break in the industry. As such, everyone in Edgewater has become something of a split personality: actor/bartender. Writer/caterer. Somebody/nobody.

Drew’s a musician/security guard, but that’s not even half of his identity crisis. Drew’s something of a de facto drug kingpin in the local entertainment circuit, though “kingpin” is a stretch. Basically, he just bribes club owners with drugs to sew up gigs for his cover band. Still, he seems to be everyone’s connection, and “kingpin” is just the kind of exaggeration Edgewater invites.

Drew’s status as a guitar god and womanizer (stage name: Jag) is an ephemeral trick of the night; without his glam wig and choreography, Drew’s just…Drew. In the daytime, he works as a security guard, watches football, and kills time with Barron, a socially inept graduate student and Drew’s hated roommate. Drew ridicules Barron without mercy, but clearly the validity of the source is to be questioned: in one scene, Drew casually picks up a telemarketer over the phone, which leads to a rendezvous. When the pair meet, Drew is so palpably disappointed with his date (and with himself) that the perfunctory sex he was jonesing for doesn’t even make it to a bedroom– they just get it over with in a parking lot.

When Drew is introduced to Layla through mutual acquaintance Barron, at first he resists the implication (Get it together, man!). Drew knows his life may not be perfect, but at least he knows how to hug the turns. But, soon enough, Drew and Layla find themselves drawn together anyway. She seems different somehow; she stirs dormant feelings in him. Is it love? Or maybe just the side effects of this alien expectation of fidelity? In any case, under her influence Drew’s life seems to stabilize. He lands a gig through Layla’s father scoring the music for a film by a first-time director. It seems a turning point, and he struggles to find focus and clean up his act— the expected course of action, he assumes, for a man on the cusp of a serious relationship. He succeeds about half of the time: not quite sure how to be an adult and too old to be a child, there is a defensive cunning to Drew that never relents. But it goes farther than being simply a tacked-on character trait; Drew was an adopted child. He is essentially rootless; a tree of no branches. What does he know how to be, other than a hyphenate?

Maybe family holds the answers he seeks. Maybe he needs to know his real identity in order to forge ahead in life with any sense of real purpose. Ever resistant to change, Drew at first dismisses the idea of looking for his birth parents. But by and by he again caves, and when the story’s over, it’s evident Drew should have listened to his instincts all along. Secrets lurk in the periphery of Drew’s waking life. Turns out being a drug dealing metal demigod was not such a bad gig.

Major Inversions is Highland’s first novel, and it’s got a high IQ and so many twists you’ll need a chiropractor. Full of clever prose, wicked humor and colorful characters, It’s a story about the precarious nature of human personalities, and how close we are to completely losing it. In fact, it has a couple of things going on at its core, the first being a somewhat sideways ode to hedonism: it’s only when Drew tries to get his shit together and become a responsible adult that his life truly jumps the rails for good. Is it karma coming to get him? In much the way the characters in Requiem for a Dream harbored delusions of grandeur that blew up in their faces, the Major Inversions triad— Drew, Layla and Barron— find themselves destroyed in one way or another by appetites that grew out of control. In Selby’s book, the wrecking drug was heroin; in Highland’s, the wrecking drugs are frighteningly ordinary: stability. Happiness. Normalcy. But further, the blame can’t be passed around to all the characters equally in Major Inversions. The main difference between the two sets of characters is that those in Requiem controlled their own fates. They made stupefyingly bad decisions and fell under their own avarice. In Major Inversions, the characters aren’t always at the controls; there is a puppeteer pulling the strings, so we can hardly blame those characters who find themselves broken at the story’s close– they just didn’t have the info required to save themselves. It’s almost draconian the way the architect of the book’s major disaster manipulates the lives of the others to satisfy a personal curiosity.

Aside from that, it’s a story of identity, or lack thereof. What fills the vacuum when we don’t know ourselves? When Drew loses himself to exterior forces, what does he become? Fantasy, usually. Edgewater’s a suburban town gone schizo– its citizens slave in day jobs to bankroll their illusions. Drew’s got issues; Layla’s an innocent falling into all the pitfalls parents fear for their daughters (and some they would utterly gasp to imagine); Barron’s an academic who has lost his way. But it’s Drew we follow. At his job as a security guard at a courthouse, Drew guesses the monetary worth of those who pass through the metal detectors he oversees. When everyone in town has got a dollar sign tattooed to their foreheads, it’s easy to let dreams of success and happiness mushroom out of control, growing into things we find hideous. Forget Chinatown; it’s Edgewater.

Order Major Inversions: www.gdotcom.com

Sheep and Wolves, Jeremy C. Shipp’s short story collection follow-up to his debut 2007 novel, Vacation, is not a quick read. Though only 160 pages, this collection demands an investment deeper than its length would suggest. Wearing the skin of the absurd while hiding the guts of a literary paranormal investigation, the collection defies casual reading and easy categorization. Sheep and Wolves must be approached carefully, chewed slowly, and swallowed cautiously.

The tales, rarely more than 10 pages in length individually, are challenging enough to traditional modes of storytelling that one must relearn the art of interpretation in order to fully appreciate them. Whether this is due to a protagonist’s drug-fueled mindset, or due to the simple idea that a story need not have a drug-fueled protagonist to be strange and unwieldy, Shipp’s stories refuse to be bound by accepted storytelling conventions.

One of the more jarring escapes from convention is the tendency for the stories of S&W to rarely establish themselves in a physical setting; asking instead that the reader make sense of context by judge of character interaction and observation. This idea isn’t new; minimalist authors have been doing it for years. However, by combining this mode with the other aspects of the bizarro genre (from BizarroCentral.com: “…often contains a certain cartoon logic that, when applied to the real world, creates an unstable universe where the bizarre becomes the norm and absurdities are made flesh”), Shipp offers an entertainingly unbalanced platform from which to leap and let his world do with you what it wants.

The story, “Baby Edward,” one of my favorites, for example, begins: There’s more than one way to kill a dream [pg. 30], and continues from there hovering between the realspace of a nondescript backyard and the headspace of our narrator. The magic of this “blurry storytelling,” whether in the aforementioned “Baby Edward,” the hypnopompic hallucinatory mind of the narrator of “Nightmare Man,” or any of the other stories, is that a character’s headspace is the realspace. Though the stories challenge the reader to discern reality from unreality, the reader is slowly taught that the purposeful blur is meant to show how unnecessary such distinctions really are.

Be warned; this collection will polarize audiences, splitting readers according to their willingness to trust in an untethered voice. Sheep and Wolves does not believe in beach reading or in hammocks and hot chocolate. It does not believe in love at first sight or in happy marriages. To be happy, Sheep and Wolves says, is to embrace the absurd. “Lies are cheaper than therapy” [pg. 69].

Welcome to the bizarro fiction movement; hail Jeremy C. Shipp.

The inherent danger with a politically grounded novel is the potential to read the book as an author’s manifesto. There is a desire for the reader to take a Rhetorical Critic’s stance on the text and interpret every politically-backed statement as the author’s personal belief. And with this danger comes the potential to polarize audiences. Joey Goebel’s third novel, Commonwealth, is weighed by this dynamic, however he has the storytelling chops to move beyond treatise territory and deliver a great story, helped, not hindered, by the political setting.

Commonwealth follows the Mapother family black sheep, “Blue Gene” Eugene, as he slowly morphs from passive flea marketer and Wal-Mart enthusiast to aggressive philanthropist with communist leanings. Blue Gene, willing dissident in regards to his family’s unfathomable fortune, adopts a working class lifestyle far removed from his wealthy family. This tension is only heightened by his brother, John Hurstbourne Mapother’s, campaign for a congressional seat. As the novel progresses, pandering for votes becomes not-to-far removed from pandering for familial affection, which forces the Mapother family into devastating conflict.

Though Blue Gene is mostly a caricature of the “red neck” conservative right, much of the conflict deals with the narrator’s unexpected struggle with these “red state” ideals as seeded by the novel’s love interest, the elfin-faced Jackie Stepchild, female lead of the anit-establishment punk band Uncle Sam’s Finger. Jackie represents a caricature of her own, the Left extremist, anti-capitalist aggravator, and the juxtaposition of the two characters adds to the Rhetorical Critic’s argument that Goebel himself may be attempting to find his place between Left and Right just as Blue Gene questions his own stance between these extremes. Much of the political points and counterpoints within the novel are so well articulated that it becomes hard to distance the author from the material. And I argue that this is exactly the point of the novel.

Beyond the politics of Commonwealth is a story very much grounded in the coming of age tradition. Blue Gene, always a proto-male, in love with monster trucks and professional wrestling, falls for Jackie in a way that might best be described as a simple crush. Though the relationship elevates as the novel progresses, Blue Gene has difficultly in admitting to his attraction, instead playing the “man’s man” role after their first extended conversation by commenting that “he hadn’t even gotten a good look at [her] breasts” [pg. 174].

Goebel’s previous novels are decidedly absent of politics, making Commonwealth quite the departure. And more so perhaps, an evolution. Where The Anomalies deals with a ragtag group of outcasts learning to accept their place in society, and Torture the Artist explores the importance of creation on a conceptual level, Commonwealth combines the two models to examine how seemingly radical views may be implemented in order to create a society properly disposed toward community rather than toward the individual.

The plot of The Golden Calf, Henry Baum’s second novel, reads like it was born of a dare. “Henry, I dare you to write a novel with a sympathetic Hollywood stalker. Give him a dull life, a dull job, call him Ray. Then turn him into an anti-celebrity missionary disgusted by the wealthy man’s ignorance of the Everyman’s plight. Make him pity Hollywood while simultaneously conscious of the need to help those wrecked by the Hollywood lifestyle. Most importantly, Mr. Baum, make me agree with this man.”

“Sure,” Henry Baum says. “And just for fun, I’ll make it damn good, too.”

The Golden Calf tracks the slow maturation of our Everyman, Ray Tompkins, from idle citizen occupied by various low rung jobs to a self-starting, though often self-important, anti-celebrity activist, stalking Brad Pitt-ish/Tom Cruise-esque kindred, Tim Griffith. His intent: to make the star “feel the curse of [his own] contentment” [pg. 110]. This all while maintaining a disquieting respect for Tompkins; an impressive balancing act considering the lengths Tompkins goes to affect the movie star.

Baum eases his protagonist into the stalking mentality with enough grace to let the reader ride the transition, rather than be jarred by it. With well-paced revelations regarding Tompkins’s always frayed childhood, family life, and personal relationships, the move from passive nobody to stalker feels natural, yet it retains necessary moral conflict in order to keep the reader engaged. Tompkins weighs this dilemma most directly when first leaving notes for Griffith at the star’s beach house:

Part of my mind was saying, don’t go, you’ll get caught and this will be all over and you haven’t done half of what you said you would do. The other half was saying, fuck him, he deserves it. Lately the latter half was winning the argument. [pg. 113]

The novel stops short of condoning Tompkins’s actions, in part by touching on the hypocrisies inherent with his actions. Ray’s subtle rise to his own version of fame – a place in life where people associate his image with destroying Hollywood egocentrism – feels too similar to the fame he claims to detest. Tompkins even touches on the need of fame in order to deliver his message of anti-fame:

To be unknown was to not exist, and that was the same as death. The best way to get fame was to touch fame, get close to it, show it what mattered and what didn’t, make it realize the things it didn’t know. [pg. 74]

These hypocrisies pepper the novel enough to destroy any façade of a perfect philosophy. Tompkins is an intentionally flawed character, driven but still human, which makes the journey all the more engaging. After all, this isn’t a manifesto or a treatise. This is a novel, and a damn good one at that.

“So, how was the read?” Henry Baum may ask.

“Beautiful,” I would say. “But I’ve learned better than to worship you for it.”