COMING THROUGH: THREE NOVELLAS, late-career excellence from a CanLit monadnock

COMING THROUGH: THREE NOVELLAS
DAVID HELWIG
Bunim & Bannigan Ltd (non-affiliate Amazon link)
from $7.99 hardcover, available from various sellers

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Writer David Helwig's place in Canadian Letters spans practically every realm, from novels, short fiction, poetry, and plays, to essays and reportage. Helwig is one of the generation of writers including Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje to achieve wide critical acclaim and popular following in Canada. Even so, Helwig remains virtually unknown in the United States. Bunim & Bannigan is pleased to present for the first time Coming Through, a unique collection of three tightly crafted novellas of remarkable variety and versatility. These wise, whimsical, and mordantly funny stories by an under-appreciated master writing in his favorite genre are sure to delight American readers.

My Review: When I discovered Author Helwig had left us behind, it was at the same time the moment I discovered he had been among us for 80 years. I peruse Wikipedia's obituaries daily, always keeping a weather eye out for departed literary lights. I am a CanLit fancier from the get-go, and was thus enticed to click further when I saw that Helwig was an eminent Canadian. His stub entry informed me that he had worked for the CBC's television drama department, that he had seventeen volumes of poetry (!), twenty-five works of fiction, two collections of essays, a memoir, and a work of narrative non-fiction to his credit, and in a career that spanned forty-five years, that he had even translated Chekhov!

Yet I had never even seen him referred to on a US or Canadian "greatest" list, run across one of his books at the Strand, or so much as heard his name.

I live in a wonderful place where my local library is happy to bring me books from all over Long Island. Luckily for me the Nassau County libraries serve 1.4 million people so they have a pretty extensive shared collection. What one of the county's various libraries doesn't have is frequently available in the larger county next door, Suffolk, with its 1.5 million people. I sallied forth to the Long Beach Library's ALIScat site and, after discovering there were several Helwig titles available, eenie-meenied this one. I was favorably impressed with this late-career effort.

I am not surprised Helwig is unknown in the US after reading it, however. These are excellent pieces, well made, but of the literary world's least popular (read: slowest selling) area: The Quiet Room. There are no pyrotechnics here. Helwig committed the sin of being born male, so he had no natural constituency lobbying for him to receive his rightful share of attention as did fellow short-fiction mavens Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. I knowingly commit literary heresy when I say this: He's every bit as talented and accomplished a storyteller as either of them.

Perhaps I have never grown beyond my young days, when every attractive young girl was a promise of the paradise garden, when I expected so much, gladdened by an eyebrow, a nose, a hank of hair, a breast, falling in love twice a day, never satisfied.

A great splash of roses...with that self-satisfied air that florist's roses always have, cosmetic abundance, the cryogenic look of a movie star after a successful facelift.

These from The Man Who Finished Edwin Drood
This short work is a uniformly excellent telling of the wages of sin. We are all monads, singular and indivisible units of universal life, for when we are divided, we are destroyed. "Wicked Uncle" (and how quickly that self-description palled!) learns, re-learns, ultimately owns his wholeness as his wronged predecessor, his wife's "starter husband" so to speak, dies in his home while in the guest room next to him.

Proceeding to some more man-centered prose, I offer:

Now the necktie is growing more unusual...to see three striped ones in this audience is odd almost to the point of that one might consider it ominous. ... Three strips of stripes from the drunken brush of God.

...{L}ife, as we all know, is not a story at all. It is the music of no mind.

I expect that the striped ties will return for the end of the last lecture, as they were here for the beginning of the first. Their pattern of presence and departure is unreadable, but all truth is unreadable until it is the heap of dead facts we call history.

These are from The Music of No Mind
A story that's so deeply sad...a has-been (really a never-was) old lecturer in art history delivers three hours of talk over three nights. He speaks about all his hobby-horses, including the rotter whose death got him the gig, who once upon a time stole his wife. Richly allusive, gorgeously pictorial, utterly incomprehensible to one unlearned in the culture of the midcentury & its roots in the Belle Epoque. It badly needs illustrations! The artworks referenced in it won't be familiar to any but those unusually informed about the visual arts.

Finally, I offer these gems:

Moods, the weather of heart and soul.

A vain, foolish man, but weren't they all? Open their zippers and their brains fall out.

Chosen from A Prayer for the Absent
It is the longest, and to my mind least successful, of the novellas. I wasn't a big fan of Carman Deshane or of Norma; they carry the story, so that's a problem. These two people are well-matched adversaries. Carman's heart is weak; Norma's body got away from her somehow. In the end, they find some end-of-life peace in their sparring. Kind of a modern All in the Family Archie and Edith. I found those two tiresome forty-plus years ago, and their constant bickering was one of the biggest things that shoved me away from regular TV watching for twenty-five years.

All in all, the many pleasures I found in all three novellas outweighed the slight but real annoyances of unwanted nostalgia in the last one. I'd recommend these tales to a reader with a wide range of interests, a person whose acquaintance with Culture of the capital-C variety is solid. Or, just to be sure I spread the tent wide, someone unafraid of using Google to maximize the impact of a leisurely read.

MALAGASH, Canada's New Weird which is really old weird and superbly crafted

MALAGASH
JOEY COMEAU
ECW Press
$11.99 ebook platforms, $15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Sunday’s father is dying of cancer. They’ve come home to Malagash, on the north shore of Nova Scotia, so he can die where he grew up. Her mother and her brother are both devastated. But devastated isn’t good enough. Devastated doesn’t fix anything. Sunday has a plan.

She’s started recording everything her father says. His boring stories. His stupid jokes. Everything. She’s recording every single “I love you” right alongside every “Could we turn the heat up in here?” It’s all important.

Because Sunday is writing a computer virus. A computer virus that will live secretly on the hard drives of millions of people all over the world. A computer virus that will think her father’s thoughts and say her father’s words. She has thousands of lines of code to write. Cryptography to understand. Exploits to test. She doesn’t have time to be sad. Her father is going to live forever.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU.

My Review:

I thought Malagash would be a small town, but it is not even that. One long road, a twisting paved red loop around the north shore of Nova Scotia. There's a tractor sitting in a field. A dirt bike leaning up against a shed. We pass a pen of llamas, who look bored as hell. The Atlantic Ocean itself comes right up to drive along beside us. Then it slips away.

The way he sounds, talking to my little brother, is different from how he sounds when talking just to me. I feel certain that it means something different too, even though the words are the exact same. This particular softness in my father’s voice is meant only for Simon.

There are parts of my father that he shows only to Simon. Parts he shows only to my mother. What if I had never heard this? What if I had never realized this?

It is a fact parents feel compelled to deny: Your relationship with each of your children is different. Each one has a different way of being themself, therefore a different side to show you and you to them. Sunday realizes this, and in realizing it pops a pustulent buboe on the buttocks of every parent/child problem: "You liked {sibling's name here} better than me!" And no parent ever says the simple truth, "Differently, darling child, never better." Routine denials, love all equally and other such impossibilities...Sunday does this wonderful bit of thinking for us all, and arrives at the correct answer. Comeau should win an award or two just for this.

I tell him that it will be our father's ghost. His memory. His echo. I tell him that a virus need not do harm. That not all self-propagating code is malicious. Our father's virus would never delete files. Would never steal passwords or spy on the intimate moments of strangers. Would not spread like cancer, but like a story. Would slip through fibre optic cables to cross oceans, would pass like radio waves through the walls of houses that nobody even knows are haunted. A ghost story that computers tell one another in the dark.

And with that, I died a little. I was utterly forlorn at the idea of a love so strong and sure emanating from a child to a parent. I never experienced that from either side. It made my own grieving heart stop with the loss I felt...not the loss of either parent, not the loss of my child, but the loss of love and family. I feel no love for my siblings, felt none for my parents, all of whom were adults when I was able to know them and self-absorbed, unkind, unpleasantly stridently needy adults who had no desire to listen to the likes of me.

Profound sadness? Not really. Regret? Grief. Poor younger me.

And the family I could have formed? Not to be. Death, despair, misery, but no family.

So reading this book was a giant act of catharsis and a huge relief to me.

BAD THINGS HAPPEN 5-star story collection full review post

BAD THINGS HAPPEN: Stories
KRIS BERTIN
Biblioasis
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The characters in Bad Things Happen—professors, janitors, webcam models, small-time criminals—are between things. Between jobs and marriages, states of sobriety, joy and anguish; between who they are and who they want to be. Kris Bertin's unforgettable debut introduces us to people at the tenuous moment before everything in their lives changes, for better or worse.

My Review: This is a first collection for Canadian writer Bertin. It represents the fruits of seven years’ life-effort in ten stories. He was well-published in prestigious venues before this book was collected. Comme d’habitude, we’ll go story-by-story with my pearls of wisdom delivered thereunto, aka the Bryce Method:

Bad Things Happen can best be summed up by this quote, spoken by a mid-thirties studmuffin to a sixteen-year-old girl (Dee) with a crush on him:

It’s people. He exhaled. People live everywhere you go, and everywhere you go, people are the same. There’s just more or less of them. … I just prefer less, he said.

Dee had broken into his house a short time before, with her instigator friend Tan, and seen what a Technicolor horror show he lived in. It began the process of disillusioning her about the starched, hunky guy her fantasies had centered on. Welcome to reality, kid. And the next bad thing that happens, well, let’s say it was absolutely no surprise but it was terrifying to any parent of a daughter. 5 stars

Make Your Move is a four-part choose your own adventure of different possible futures for a man with the grimmest past you can think of. He gets into his work limo, and then the fun begins, as the author travels the roads not taken. It’s amazing how much pain Bertin can pack into the one solid evening of driving the kind of people who rent limos around and about, to bars, to Wendy’s drive-through, to a snot-nosed kid’s house where his hot mom is worried about him. In the end it’s eight castles and a few fish. 4.5 stars

The Narrow Passage is a perfect movie outline. It’s the working life of Richard, soon to be a father, and Gene, a man whose maturity has been spent picking up garbage in a rural-to-village stretch of Canada. Does anybody remember the show The X Files and its scariest, weirdest episode, the one called “Home?” This story is a cross between it and the movie Deliverance. It kept me awake half a night, poor bastard Richard making a grim discovery:

He seemed to always have a dull headache that stayed with him so long everything seemed grey and strange, like he was in a dream. He felt empty and drained, like a shadow of himself cast on a wall. It was in this state, early in the morning, that he tipped over a steel drum with his work gloves and saw it:
Two beach towels, decorated with the California Raisins, soaked through with blood.
… The towels were balled up, and after he grabbed them, something fell out in the snow and landed with a thick kind of wetness. They were at {their worst pick-up}.
A girl’s nightie, green with lace trim, dark and wet.
The blood looked fresh and red and only a bit of it gone brown, because it was partially frozen. Not even in a bag, but tossed in overtop of one, almost casually. Like it was meant to be there.

The horrors of the rural Narrows of the story’s title are those endemic to any poverty-stricken area; but this particular stop, the lowlifes whose garbage heap Richard and Gene collect without comment or complaint per Gene’s worried instructions, is fast becoming the stuff of Richard’s nightmares. (Mine too. Maybe it comes with the name?) By the story’s end, we’re all ready for the storm to break and when it does, well, it’s just not what you would ever want to know happens in the civilized world. By far the best story in the collection. 5 stars

Girl on Fire Escape sizzles and pops with the energy of a twentysomething guy’s need for sex and connection in any way, shape, or form. Our screw-up of a narrator is working the dish pit in a big city restaurant at night, and washing windows of commercial buildings with a friend in the daytime. His friend is dating a young woman who works as a cam model, which distresses him but it’s a good living. Through this connection our narrator meets and fucks and then steals money with another cam model, a woman with a c-section scar and a very distinctive and beautiful tattoo on her chest. These two lost souls don’t so much connect as they fall into a mutual orbit around the center of gravity that is loneliness. By the end of the story, they’re either going to be Sailor and Lula or Rick and Ilsa. 4.5 stars

Is Alive and Can Move helped me understand my alcoholic roommate much better. It’s the inner monologue of a young-ish survivor of acute alcohol abuse that’s left him with alcohol-induced dementia. He hallucinates reality, an odd concept but one that keeps the story on the move. It’s heartbreaking to realize that, without strict adherence to a routine and a diet of real food and a regimen of medication, people in that stage of brain damage simply don’t function. Bertin, to his great credit, never loses sight of his character’s human dignity, and still tells the tale of the hallucinated reality the narrator lives in with unnerving candor. Doing so without either falling into preach mode or judgment mode is quite a feat. 4.5 stars

Crater Arms did not make one whit of sense to me. I read it three times and came away from each reading without a single clue what I was supposed to get from the experience, and what I actually got was bubkes. Like life. And so it goes. 3.5 stars

Everywhere Money couldn’t make me like the phone scammer narrating it, but I did come away with the idea that money meant less to him than accomplishing something, doing something that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’m like that as well, a task-oriented kind of being. But phone scammers are ambulatory shit-piles. We meet Tan, from “Bad Things Happen”, again in this story, and she’s as fucked up as anyone could wish her to be. Her criminal career is well-established, apparently, as she’s working at stealing numbers (slang for credit card and personal data to access the line of credit) from big ballers at a private club to her boyfriend’s sad little phone scammer gig. This world that Bertin’s busily creating for us isn’t one we’d like to live in ourselves, is it? Too much criminality. Too little compassion. But sadly very real. 4.5 stars

The Story Here sounds really familiar to me. A genuinely and frighteningly dysfunctional family has an impromptu family reunion at the narrator’s house. As the only daughter of the three children, the mother of two and wife of one suddenly has her despised serial monogamist/adulterer father on her couch, her typical sibling rival older brother arriving with his new fiancée for family approval, her former stepmother banging on the door demanding to see the cheating old coot who is leaving her, and to top it all off the forest around her house is being leveled and blasted for new development. No wonder she dreams of the end of the world:

I learned to think of the dream not as something that comes to me, but as something that I have. An organ that inflates when my head is on the pillow, fills up the chambers of my mind, and takes over the last hour before my alarm goes off.
In the dream, there’s no comet or atom bomb or alien invaders. No catalyst, just a mindset that we’re all in. It’s just the end and everyone knows it. The only thing that gives it away is how the other people are acting. Cars are clogging the streets, guys with huge crucifixes and torches and Bibles and robes are on the sidewalk, or even on my lawn, and everyone else is just going crazy, screaming or crying or pleading with the sky like something’s listening up there. A lot of people on their knees.

Stress, anxiety, depression...all of the above...middle aged crisis...the narrator isn’t the first or the last person to feel that the world is ending when it’s more likely that she’s just unmercifully bored, frustrated, and trapped. And by the end of the story, I felt that any one of these characters would happily gnaw a limb off to escape the traps they set off every time any of them opens their mouth for any reason except to eat. 5 stars

The Eviction Process features a gay couple, criminals both, in the process of shutting down and revamping their former weed-growing operation house. This necessitates getting the formerly necessary associates to get out of the house along with the grow-lights and so on. Things go smoothly, too smoothly, on their first attempt; then it all falls to hell around them. The older man of the couple has an autistic son who has, apparently, no connection to anyone or anything in reality, and whose function seems to be to buzz, scream, click...our narrator, the younger man, can’t get through the profound disconnect between the child and reality, and the older man has a habit of beating people up, including his lover. As the situation reaches crisis point, there is a disaster that makes emotions run hot and dangerous, but violence is averted by the simulacrum of lovingkindness that glues the two men together. 5 stars

Your #1 Killer reunites us with our dishwashing drifter turned phone scammer as he slinks home to his mom in order to go crazy, get thoroughly drunk, play childhood games and generally cocoon himself in his addictions until, at last, the world around him snaps into focus again. It only does so as he begins a new career: Killing things. Pests, gophers, hornets, skunks, all in less-than-usual ways. His mother, like all mothers, wants him to be happy; he is a sullen stinking mess, which doesn’t make anyone happy. As his recovery of self-esteem gathers momentum, it’s finally in his head that his mother is a real person, is the undeserving recipient of his unkindness and therefore must be treated right at last. It’s the most hopeful story in the collection. It’s a good feeling to see this self-absorbed twit pull his socks up and get on with life in a strange, but workable manner. 4.75 stars

I think that might be the description of Bertin’s rough world in toto: Strange, but workable. Life doesn’t look the same at the bottom of the heap. It’s still life. There’s another day for each of these folks, another chance to make a difference if only to themselves. This is a terrific collection of quality work. Kris Bertin, I salute you, and am awaiting what comes next with happy anticipation.

IF OUR WEALTH IS CRIMINAL THEN LET'S LIVE WITH THE CRIMINAL JOY OF PIRATES: Small book with *really* long title

IF OUR WEALTH IS CRIMINAL THEN LET'S LIVE WITH THE CRIMINAL JOY OF PIRATES
JACOB WREN
Book*hug/A Boondoggle Book
$10.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From multidisciplinary artist and author Jacob Wren comes a small book of big ideas. Originally produced as a 'Boondoggle Book' limited edition specifically for the first Authors for Indies Day in Toronto, this small and delightful book is a must-have for fans of the author of POLYAMOROUS LOVE SONG (named one of the top 100 books of 2014 by The Globe and Mail). IF OUR WEALTH IS CRIMINAL THEN LET'S LIVE WITH THE CRIMINAL JOY OF PIRATES collects two short stories and an essay by Jacob Wren. In the first story, 'The Infiltrator, ' certain ongoing, rarely mentioned, difficulties for the activist Left are explored with unlikely candour. In 'Four Letters from an Ongoing Series, ' the postal service becomes an unwitting accomplice to the gatekeepers of potential culture. Finally, in the essay 'Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith, ' questions of art and emptiness shift focus in relation to the agency that at all times surrounds us.

My Review: As always with story collections, I'll offer specific comments on the stories themselves and finish up with some wise (or wise-ass) summing up. Without further ado, I deploy the Bryce Method's time-tested techniques:

The Infiltrator is either the shortest récit I've ever seen or it's a short story with the same intimate effect as a récit because we never get out of our nameless narrator's head. It's more effective at greater length, in my opinion, but there is nothing wrong with the story's story. It's fascinating to look at an agent provocateur's strange mental state. The money? The cause? I can't imagine. The narrator's account of his actions are without emotional responses; the narrator records the emotions of the people she or he is manipulating without attempting to respond to them personally. Curiously, I found this more telling of the narrator's character than any more noisy declaration could have. This is an amoral person. This is the bad seed your mother warned you about. 4 stars

Four Letters from an Ongoing Series details the dreary, pointless existence (it's not in any way describable as a life) of an aspiring writer. From information within the frame of the story, he sounds like a white, middling-aged bore who has never escaped the analysis paralysis that a liberal arts education can put some people in:

I hate it when I feel like a man. It is probably even worse when I don't, since those are times when I am coasting through territory where my privilege is even more invisible to me than usual.

Self awareness? Or narcissistic navel-gazing? Both in some degree?

His manuscript, one assumes the same one each time, is rejected by four presses. Each letter he receives is more explicit about why they aren't publishing it. Midway through this painful process of absorbing so much rejection, he ruminates on the very business he's trying to enter:

Will literature last forever or is it practically already a thing of the past? And how do we even define literature, since without some definition it is barely possible to judge the field's relative health or disrepair. Are my overly refined tastes--predelictions and preferences I've spent most of a lifetime overly refining--the most useful criteria or do they pertain only to my personal idiosyncrasies? Would it be better to have something more generalized, a canon most might agree upon, or would this very canon simply be a dampening force, pushing down the lid, creating conventions through consensus both more consensual and more conventional?

If he writes the way he thinks, no wonder his manuscript bounces back to him so often. Yeah, all of that blahblahblah is true and valid. But outside an academic journal or a classroom this is some seriously dreary verbiage.

The last rejection letter is a rant of epic proportions, ordering the narrator to go out and live, to get his head out of his butt and maybe then he'd have something other than his pathetic life to write about. However good this order is, what a difference it might have made...human nature wins. 3.5 stars

Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith: Notes on art, meaning, emptiness and spirituality really doesn't need more explanation than the instruction "read that title again and reflect carefully on how it can relate to the subtitle" and this paragraph from the text:

I wonder if the framework within which most contemporary art attempts to generate meaning is analogous to the 'never been modern' framework that {Bruno} Latour criticizes {in his major work, We Have Never Been Modern}. Art is a world that separates, continuously playing the divisions against one another in ways that are often contradictory: good art against bad art, art against everything else, political art against commerce, etc. The gallery is the place for art, but it is also a way of removing art from the rest of life.

Has Wren lost faith in the idea of modernity? The art exhibition that elicited this essay from him was called 'Animism,' a group of works in multiple media by artist Anselm Francke. Wren tells us he didn't actually see the exhibition, only read the catalogue; how amazing must this show have been to make a very intelligent man dig so deeply into his psyche and gift us with this revealing, delicious meditation on humanity and our endless search for meaning.

I read this book, slim but deep, in an hour of happy immersion. It's been my introduction to Jacob Wren, and to BookThug's very, very interesting publishing program. Apart from two pet peeves (stationAry instead of stationEry; it's instead of its), this is a tight and involving package of words. It's going to be even more fun for me to read Wren's novels now. I am looking forward to it, and I suspect many other readers will be right there with me. 5 stars

August Book-A-Day #1: VALLEY OF DAY-GLO by Nich DiChario

VALLEY OF DAY-GLO
NICK DiCHARIO
Robert J. Sawyer Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.6* of five

The Publisher Says: "Broadway Danny Rose is on the move!"

In this brightly satiric, postapocalyptic novel of the far future, a young Indian brave named Broadway Danny Rose embarks upon a quest across the desolate planet Earth to find the mysterious Valley of Day-Glo, where plants and animals and large bodies of water are rumoured to still exist, and where, according to legend, "death becomes life."

Valley of Day-Glo is a brilliant blend of Douglas Adams' farcical humour and Kurt Vonnegut's droll absurdity. Hugo Award-nominee Nick DiChario delivers a witty and poignant story that deals with the power of myth, the search for truth, and the meaning of life and death.

My Review: The UK Book-A-Day meme, a book a day for August 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten SF-book reviews. Today's prompt, the first one of August, recalls to mind a book with a memorable first line.

The day Mother Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? killed Father The Outlaw Josey Wales, they were arguing again about the Pre-Reddening game of Major League Baseball.

Baseball, post-apocalyptic future, and the kind of names I associate with A Canticle for Leibowitz...okay, I'm in.

And that was the last thing I really grokked for the next 210pp. The Bibles of the various Indian (the word used in the book, leave me alone about it) tribes are all random survivors of the pre-Apocalyptic Honio'o (white) culture. They are some dillies, including a network marketing self-help text and a book of baseball statistics and records.

Broadway Danny Rose, our narrator and the son of Mother Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Father The Outlaw Josey Wales, appears to be an intersex person. This is a problem for a tribe reduced to three people. In due course, the tribe is reduced to Broadway Danny Rose, and that's the end of that:

The woman tried her best to entice me, calling me 'dear, sweet boy,' stroking and pumping me as if I were a bleating animal from which she hoped to produce milk. Father turned into a cheerleader when he saw things weren't going well, clapping his hands, patting my back, pushing me on top of the old harlot again and again, as if I might discover some buried treasure deep within the gaping, malodorous hollow between her legs.

And that, laddies and gentlewomen, is the end of this particular road.

As Broadway Danny Rose journeys Candide-like through the landscape of a world brutally and completely destroyed by the Honio'o, he meets several different tribes and nearly succumbs to several different fates, but in the end he fetches up in the Valley of Day-Glo, where death becomes life, and where Mother Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? intended to take the murdered carcass of Father The Outlaw Josey Wales so that the tribe might continue to eke an existence out of the way of the great and powerful Seneca people.

Once in the place where death becomes life, Broadway Danny Rose is met by the Cuisinart Coffeepot that rules the Valley of Day-Glo. (Believe me when I tell you that by the time this eventuates, you won't care that it makes little to no sense.) After a discussion with Father The Outlaw Josey Wales in which the naked intersex Broadway Danny Rose learns nothing new, the book ends.

I'm not actually being over-generous with my stars here. There are moments of weirdness that make one impatient, and then there are phrases like this:

I could feel a headache circling in on me with the long, careful, merciless descent of a carrion bird.

I liked the verve and the manic energy of the book. I appreciated that the author and publisher kept it short. I enjoyed the sharpness of the satire, and the mischievous survival of so much bad-book publishing.

But I am not going to warble a paean of praise for it, exhorting all who come into range to buy and consume the story. Most non-SF readers would simply not enjoy the read at all. Bizarro readers will feel it's tame. The Longface Puritans' League will whinny about how pointless and amusing the book is, these being their cardinal sins for writing. (WHAT?! Someone might ENJOY it?! BURN IT NOW!!)

So why should you read it? Cat fur to make kitten britches, as Mama used to say. Read it because it's there, or don't read it at all, or pick it up at a garage sale with a vague memory of an old review...you never know.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.