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B3: The Week That Was

27 Jun

We came out with a tentacle whipping crack this week with a review of China Mieville’s Kraken and ended with questions whether vampires and werewolves are still “monsters.”

Monday: China Mieville’s Kraken is an occult shell game, bursting with trippy slang, pop-culture riffs & tentacle like plot that twists to climax.

Tuesday: What the bloody umlat!? We wondered why Scandinavian crime fiction has suddenly become so popular? Considering how gentile they seem to us in the States, when did places like Sweden and Norway become hot beds of murderous writings?

Wednesday: Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy is a collection of short stories are concise and deep, not something you often find together. Eleven stories in 232 pages that universally explore loneliness in all sorts of characters.

Thursday: It crossed our minds recently that vampires and monsters when we were growing up were monsters, something to be feared and hunted. Now, the fanged ones are hunky loners with blood lusts but hearts of gold. Are they still monsters to you?

Friday: We tackled the review of Metrophilias, a short story collection that tracked and delved into the nature of lust and desire in 36 stories spread through 36 cities.

Saturday: Sometimes you think you have an iron clad memory when it comes to books read as a kid. Well recently we were reminded of two foundation books that changed one readers life.

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Biblioholic Review: Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It

23 Jun

Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy was released last July to rave reviews, settling in among the top ten best books New York Times Book Review 2009.  This July it will be released in paperback and Meloy will be making the bookstore rounds, stopping at Harvard Bookstore on July 28th, lucky for us.

This collection of short stories are concise and deep, not something you often find together. Eleven stories in 232 pages that universally explore loneliness in all sorts of characters.  There are three stories that deal with philandering husbands but they are written from different perspectives and never place blame but rather explore human nature, specifically our nature to ‘want our cake and eat it’.

In the 2nd to last story, The Children, the  main character Fielding  provides the title namesake when deciding to leave his wife or break-up with his mistress, quoting A.R. Ammons, “…both ways is the only way I want it.”  Fielding, like all the characters in this collection, is seemingly paralyzed by indecision.  Meloy prose is straight forward and deceptively provocative, allowing one’s mind to delve the deeper meaning of the stories than the words themselves.  She masterfully creates a complete and meaningful portrayal of a character at a crossroads and unable to decide which way to go, in 26 pages or less, time and time again.

Some of these stories are dark, specifically in the beginning of the collection and make us at BBB wonder, is it a trend to write about implied child molestation, raffling off sex and drunken accidental deaths in short story format?  Having recently read and reviewed another short story collection, More of This World or Maybe Another that also explored troubled aspects of human nature, it seems Meloy and other short story authors are using this format to write intense stories that may be a bit too much if it lasted more than 30 pages.   We are enjoying this melancholy trend.

Bothy Ways Is The Only Way I Want It was received as a free review copy

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Biblioholic Review: More of this World or Maybe Another

28 May

More of this World or Maybe Another is Barb Johnson’s first published collection of short stories.  Johnson took a winding road to become an author, first a carpenter, then a victim of Hurricane Katrina, and the reader feels Johnson’s experience reverberating throughout the collection.

All nine stories take place in poverty-stricken New Orleans.  These tales are gritty!  There is sadness to every movement, but there is also hope, even if sometimes it is expressed as denial.

Four of the nine tales center on Delia, who if this were a novel would be the heroine and seems at first glance the tie that binds all the other characters together.  A closer look reveals these lives intersect in many ways, not the least of by the snack machine in the laundromat.  Luis, the little boy in the last story sums up the importance of the snack machine as a holder of hopes and dreams when he says “…is dark except for the snack machine.  It glows like a nightlight for Palmyra Street.”

Beautiful and desperate at the same time.

These tales are engrossing and are tied so closely together it is a little hard to distinguish this book as a collection of short stories instead of a novel. It’s a question continually asked during the reading, ‘Why isn’t this a novel?’ Sometimes short story collections subconsciously prompt a reader to jump about. With More of this World, we read straight through like a novel, no skipping about. It’s a testament to Johnson, whose skill binds these stories to a uninterrupted sequence. We liked the stories the more we read, the more emotionally invested in the characters we became, we were committed to her arc.

Sure each individual tale can stand on its own and technically these stories can and do, but each story is really better because of the story proceeding it.

All nine stories are good, but some are great, especially the finale “St. Luis of Palmyra”.

No matter the format or structure, Johnson’s words are completely enjoyable and emotionally potent.

More of this World or Maybe Another by Barb Johnson was purchased by the Boston Book Bums.

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Short Story Bits & Bytes

11 May

One member of the Boston Book Bums writing crew is an aspiring novelist. He has a journalism background, but happened into a universe of speculative fiction that surprises even him. It combines his love of history, and ‘fact’ with the most audacious and wild stories of the occult and paranormal.

The reason we mention this member of the review team is that it dawned on him that short stories, in number, tell a better tale than some behemoth, unwieldy uber novels that occupy way too much shelf space.

His literary epiphany comes as short stories enjoy a bit of a rejuvenation that may perfectly coincide with the rise of e-books and mobile reading platforms. If anything, the layouts of an iPhone screen or slim digital reader lend themselves perfectly to byte sized stories with bite.

Short stories have always stuck around, enjoying many highs and lows over the past few decades. During the height of the pulp era, short story magazines were plentiful, satiating those quick reading needs of the common folk. But as society changed, so did reading habits and short stories found their audience diminish.

Think about a good short story. Recall the gut feeling it elicited in you. The potency of its brevity, driven by the need to wring the maximum emotional or story telling impact from every single word. Leaving nothing to spare.

This same dedication to telling a tight story has been embraced by many novice authors online via blogs and even to a certain extent Twitter. One hundred and forty character tales, strung out over several posts, days or even weeks. Ingenious.Think about how Jack Kerouac crafted On the Road on taped together pieces of paper at a length of 120 feet. What happens if you separated each page and spread them out over weeks or months? Who is to say that a truly talented writer doesn’t string together dozens of Twitter or blog posts to create a digital age masterpiece.

Sure there are loads of marginally talented scribes out in the world, however there could be just as many great story tellers who feel more comfortable inhabiting short stories than fleshing out massive stories with wasted words.

Related to this renewed launch of short stories is the rekindling of novellas and novelettes, truly the antithesis to the bloated cinder-block sized blockbusters. Throw in the potential of burgeoning self-publishing co-ops and we readers might have a whole new world of entertainment awaiting us.

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When Nightmares Nurture Dreams

8 May

Tales of Moonlit Daydreams by Rebecca Carter is a collection small horror stories, personally told with literary goals other than fame or fortune.

They are tales of zombie Raptors, sadists and IT vampires. Horror, pure and simple. While some of the Boston Book Bums aren’t traditionally horror folks, we figured Moonlit Daydreams was worth a shot, for some different, non-literary reasons.

Self-published author Carter embraces horror lit’s pulp DNA with Tales of Moonlit Daydreams. These are uncomplicated stories of bedtime spook-fests or tales whispered on the front porch as fireflies dance about the night sky.

These stories, full of blood and gut spilling bile, could easily get lost in the online shuffle. However, they warrant a note because they have an added purpose. According to Carter they were crafted, in part, as a way to help support her beloved community.

Carter hails from Kannapolis, NC,  home to notables of NASCAR and birthplace of the George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic fame; where mills once ruled supreme and their Class A baseball team, the Intimidators, is named for the late Dale Earnhardt’s racing moniker.

She notes on her website how times are tough in her beloved burg nestled in the southwest of the Tar Heel state.

Kannapolis, writes Carter on her website, “struggled for years over the loss of our mills and while progress is coming, it is coming slow.”

Without hesitation, she simply states, “If I can sell 25,000 books by the end of August 2010 (It takes a while for my physical counts from amazon to come in) I will use some of the proceeds to open a store here. The store will carry mainly handcrafted or indie products and will not carry items that are carried through major retail outlets. I hope to get the majority of these products from locals.”

Her ambition seems genuine and admirably lofty. Who knows if its realistic or not, we are not to judge or guess.

But, what we do know is that sometimes nightmares can, and should, nurture dreams.

A digital copy of Tales of Moonlit Daydreams was received by the Boston Book Bums for free.

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