Listen Carefully

Books are selfish, they demand full attention and if I don’t give it to them they will hold onto their secrets and mysteries and divulge nothing.   I can’t read while doing ANYTHING else.  I read a study about how teenagers can multi-task better than most adults.  Well, duh, they grew up in a world where everything has a lower case “i” in front of it to help them sort out their MTV worlds and practice their multi-tasking skills.  I had no such devices, but still grew up in the MTV world wherein every image is edited in a series and no single image is onscreen for more than twenty seconds.

There is ONE thing I can do while reading.  I can eat.  I can sit down with a bowl of some partially hydrogenated snack with sodium and high fructose corn syrup and read and add a fresh layer of plaque to my arteries and another inch or two to my waist because I can eat with a lot more vigor than I can read.

For some reason, the crunching
doesn't bother my reading

Sigh.

Reading on a treadmill is a revolutionary new way to fall off treadmills. Reading while cooking dinner is a great way to overcook food. Reading in a waiting room is OK, but the timing is unpredictable and I lose the narrative voice and tension reading in small increments.  Even music takes me away from what I’m reading.  I’ve never thought of myself as having ADHD, but I never thought about it long enough to figure out if I actually had it.

Audiobooks, good books with good readers, are like my occupational therapy.  Once the ear buds are in and my attention is locked, the world is mine and the book I want to read is no longer anchoring my butt to a chair.  It’s freedom.   

I worked two jobs for extra cash that helped me plow through countless hours of books. 

You ever open your screen door and get annoyed because some yahoo shoved a flyer for some stupid useless thing in it?  Or maybe you go into the grocery store, load your things in the car, start driving away and the flyer is tucked under the windshield wiper, just out of reach so you have to pull over, get out and get rid of it? 

Yeah, I did that.

 For about six months I passed out flyers for a female-only gym in Raleigh, NC.  The flyer was a picture of a morbidly obese woman in a bathing suit, shot from behind, with the name of the gym at the top and some horrible phrase about how you don’t want to look like this at the beach. 

I’m not making this up, and I sure didn’t make the flyer.  I just distributed it.  I swear.   

Anyway, I put on sunglasses, a hat, a fake mustache, (kidding, I didn’t have one) a backpack full of flyers and an old Sony Discman with headphones and away I went. 

Tom Stechulte

I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men on CD at the library.  I heard folks talking about it and knew the Coen Brothers were going to make a movie so I decided it was time to check it out.  The reader, an actor with the unpronounceable last name Stechschulte narrated McCarthy’s prose in a gruff, pained voice I could listen to all day.

I was even disappointed in the movie version simply because the characters just didn’t sound right to me.  I listened to it twice and fit in an actual reading thereafter

. 

Tom Stechschulte also read I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down by William Gay and Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane.  He gets it just right every time, I could listen to him read my Saturday shopping list and be riveted.

I walked through every neighborhood in North Raleigh accompanied by Stechsulte and McCarthy, for three or four hours at a time, dropping flyers on cars and screen doors. I ignored the uncomfortable feelings as I advanced through everyone’s front yard to their front door. I was getting paid to read and exercise. I felt like an explorer venturing into cul-de sacs.  

I was hooked.  I loved being able to move and “read” at the same time.  It helped that McCarthy was such a new experience for me. 

 I followed it with the first three Dexter books, McCarthy’s The Road, The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer, a ton of Phillip K. Dick stories, The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney,  Anansi Boys by Neil Gaimen, short stories by Poe and Kafka and Bradbury, westerns and crime stories by Elmore Leonard and rediscovered my appreciation for Stephen King. 

I stopped reading King when From a Buick 8 was published.  I hated that book.  It was dull and I just couldn’t get into it.  Until I listened to it, and the readers were outstanding and brought the book to life.

At that point I never read Salem’s Lot (I don’t like vampires) but the audiobook is fantastic,  Ron McLarty is a great reader, and lends his deep, mean voice to other King works like Blaze, Stationary Bike, and A Very Tight Place from Just After Sunset.   I can’t imagine a better reader for horror novels.

Except Campbell Scott, who read my favorite King book, The Shining. 

There would be no way I could have finished Lisey’s Story in book form, but Mare Winngham found the narrative for me and delivered it pitch perfect from beginning to end, somehow taking passages that looked silly in print and translated the tension and wonder. 

I was also working on Saturdays mowing lawns, blowing leaves and dirt and cleaning up yards.  There I listened to On Writing and felt like Steve and I were just buddies having a conversation.  I went through it twice, with an actual reading in between. 

When the woman-only gym closed down and the yard work dried up for the winter, I cleaned out the library of every last book I had any interest in whatever.  Dog needs to go out?  Fifteen minutes of 11/22/63.  Forty five minutes of cardio is another forty five minutes of The Passage by Justin Cronin.  

It doesn’t always work, I couldn’t get through several crime novels I won’t name due either to boring serial killer fiction or a listless reading.  Compared to the number of books I start reading and never finish though, it’s a fraction. 

Audible.com is a great source, but in my mind a little expensive.  The library is the best place to start; most libraries have online catalogs with mp3’s to download and dozens of great books you can listen to.  

If you like horror fiction www.pseudopod.org has some great stories by great authors, but be prepared, the going is rough and DARK.  The SF equivalent, Escape Pod and the fantasy version, Podcastle are also interesting places to find fiction.  

Some of my favorites to get you started:  

BLACK HILL by Orrin Grey - The best horror story ever about oil drilling.

HOMETOWN HORRIBLE by Matthew Bey  - A great, disturbing read with a grotesque ending. 

COME TO MY ARMS MY BEAMISH BOY - by Douglas F. Warrick  - Takes the scariest subject I know of, Alzheimer's Disease and gives it a surreal, nightmarish shape with a strangely beautiful ending.  

The Dark Knight Rises: a Sudden and Nearly Terminal GEEK Panic

The Dark Knight Rises is a good movie. 

It is a well plotted, ambitious film with key set pieces to match the immense scope of Christopher Nolan’s vision of Gotham city as an amalgam of every giant USA metropolis you’ve ever seen.  He populates the vision with a highly talented cast of actors capable of carrying the city to great heights.

So why, during the first 45 minutes or so, did my heart start racing?  Why did it feel like the oxygen was slowly being sucked out of the room?  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the suspense or the dramatic tension.  It was the lack of both. 

That’s right, I went into full on Geek Panic. 

Very little in the film’s intro was working for me and all I could see was a flashing red BAT symbol in the sky and no Batman (in real life OR the movie)to come and save me from what was going to be another boring two hours of stuff that falls just short of being good. 

Make no mistake, expectations were very high and no one should apologize for that.  Batman Begins and especially The Dark Knight were consistently terrific action movies on very serious canvases.  Nolan has built a reputation as a filmmaker who makes very few mistakes with very large budgets and doesn’t resort to silliness to get his audience.  Who else has a record like that? 

The first third of the film lacks tension and mystery.  The airplane hi-jacking was impressive only in its scale, not in its execution.   You can’t compare this to the opening heist in The Dark Knight, a creepy montage of clown masked thieves who pop each other off until there’s only one clown left. 

 You also can’t underestimate the importance of Batman himself.  Batman Begins worked because the focus was on Batman becoming Batman and an excellent rendering of a city plagued by crime and corruption. 

The Dark Knight succeeded because Batman met a worthy adversary.  In The Dark Knight, Nolan used a brilliant performance by Heath Ledger and some great storytelling and filmmaking to make the Joker, probably the most familiar of all comic book villains, a mysterious and terrifying force of nature. 

In the Dark Knight Rises, he takes one of the most unfamiliar and mysterious villains (Bane) and through some dubious decision making, makes him flat and uninspiring.  Bane is a one trick, muscle bound pony.  He can beat people up and give long drawn out monologues that would be hilarious if this movie were The Incredibles. 

I won’t go so far as to say Bane was BAD, but I will say that he wasn’t a worthy nemesis.  The strange mask may look scary, but it also robbed a crazy, brilliant actor (Thomas Hardy) of turning in a good performance. 

They could have given the role to…say, The Rock, and had Hardy just do the voice.  Or else skip actors altogether and make him a digital creation like The Hulk.  Without facial expressions and a human voice, Bane is hardly a real presence as the villain. 

His voice is a curious combination of Sean Connery, Darth Vader and the villain from Penelope Pittstop. Go ahead and look up Snidely Whiplash on youtube.  You’ll see.  Go ahead.

It’s comical.  In a serious, dark movie about a guy who dresses like a bat, there is little room for such mistakes.  Spiderman?  You can get away with it.  Superman?  Maybe.  Ghost Rider?  Definitely. 

And that’s not all. 

Take the somehow rushed and eternal scene between Bruce Wayne and Alfred having a Lifetime Network conversation in a boring room of Wayne Manor discussing Dead Rachel from The Dark Knight.  If Michael Cain is going to cry in a Batman movie, you’d better make me believe it.  I didn’t.  The melodrama was cringe inducing.  I had to look away, and it was hard because I was in the front row.

Again, this is a serious scene, a scene that forms Bruce Wayne/Batman’s motivation even beyond the murder of his parents as a child and it feels tacked on.  Worse than that, it’s tacked on by a great director and two very talented actors. 

This sense of being rushed and yet somehow ponderous and clumsy pervades many early scenes.  Compare Alfred’s description of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises to Alfred’s description of the Joker in The Dark Knight.  It’s virtually the same conversation except less cool.  Less scary.  Less mysterious.  If you’re going to copy something like that, give it a twist.

Everyone monologues, because you know, monologues show how important and deep something is.  The problem is all the monologues start sounding like blather and there is no Joker to freshen things up with a conversation about how he likes to use knives.  Heck, there isn’t even much of a Batman presence to freshen things up. 

So it all falls on Anne Hathaway to spice things up and Thank God she does.  Never in a million geek years (1 geek year = 10 minutes of high anticipation)would I have expected Hathaway to pull this off, but then again I was skeptical about Heath Ledger as the Joker and look how that turned out. 

 Again, Nolan takes a familiar character and makes it special.  Catwoman has the best lines, (yes, even the best monologues) and delivers them with a passion and energy everyone else lacks.  It’s a shame she disappears for long stretches, there was something special there.

 

Joseph Gordon Levitt also makes the most of his role, and Nolan injects some much needed mystery into his character.  Gary Oldman, always reliable, turns in another understated performance as Commissioner Gordon.   Marion Cotillard also performs ably in the large cast, her exotic voice and features playing well into the plot of the movie.  Morgan Freeman is underused compared to the last two films, but it would be silly to blame him for that. 

It’s not all bad. If you could watch The Dark Knight Rises from an objective distance, the story is magnificent.  The plot points are strong and surprising, with big reveals and excellent tie-ins to Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

Having some time to think about it, my nearly terminal Geek panic kicked in because Nolan took too long to get his enormous machine of a plot rolling.  Once it gets rolling, (yes, when the explosions start) the movie starts to feel in control and more sure of itself. 

There’s no way to go on without giving away too much of the plot.  I enjoyed the carnage and explosions and the sheer scale of it all, but watching Nolan tie the movies together at the end was a real joy, and worth the cost of admission by itself.  And yes… the very end more than redeems  the Michael Cain crying scene.

 

And I should remind myself, and anyone else who was sadly underwhelmed, consider your own geek factor.  I freely and wholly admit my expectations for this film and my love for The Dark Knight has colored my perception and am willing to admit some distance may improve it. 

And always, always remember: a half-good Nolan film is still better than the best Michael Bay film.  So there’s that. 

An Act Of Violence on Time

A young woman holds her hair back with both hands and moves in closer to the mirror.  She frowns, and pulls back to a safe distance.  She slides a porcelain brush through her long blonde hair. 

When she finishes, she returns to the mirror, her brow furrowed with worry.  Her phone rings.

“Hello?” She asks.  “You will speak this time… hello?”  She speaks with a Polish accent, a staccato flow of English words.  She watches herself in the mirror as she talks, as if practicing for some future conversation.

“Do not hang up!” She slams the phone down.  “Five times this week!  Call and hang up..” 

A man in a gray suit appears in the mirror.  He has bushy eyebrows and an ever present cigarette burning away in his left hand. 

Time is never on our side, it moves forward at its own patient insistence, and no barrier formed by man has been able to hold it. 

Take one Ania Wieczorek, a haunted woman with no desire to see time peel away the one thing her poor upbringing didn’t take away from her: her beauty.

Ania applies make-up to her face with care, the way a historian would handle a priceless ancient document. 

Ania is a stunning young woman, the envy of girls and the desire of men, her beauty an unpredictable magnet for both good and evil.  To date, she’s learned to deal with both, but she will find that mirrors and watches cannot tell her everything she needs to know, because often reflection is an elusive thing… in the Twilight Zone…

A red and yellow 1959 Desoto Firesweep pulls in front of Ania’s apartment.    The horn blows.  

Ania glances out the window and shakes her head. 

“Boys with their silly toys…” 

She opens the window and leans out. 

A young man with an expensive leather jacket pulls himself through the driver’s side window. 

“Babe, come on already…”

Ania scowls at him. 

 “You will wait…” 

Ania goes back to her mirror and finishes her work.

+++

“You’re only 26 and everybody in the room, including me, wishes they looked as good as you.  You worry too much….” 

“Will worry… make me look older?”  Ania asks. 

“No, hon… but this conversation is making me older… you should get over yourself a little. You have a good job at the hospital; you’re smart and gorgeous…” 

A waiter brings their coffee in white mugs on saucers. 

“Arlene…” Ania says, “…I have a… how do say in English… a confession?” 

“A confession?  Oh girl, I ain’t no Catholic…”

“I’m 34 years old.” 

Arlene stops the mug halfway to her lips and returns it to the saucer. 

“What?” 

“In Poland, lying was easy.  Here, lying is… necessary.” 

Ania moves too quickly for her coffee cup and it tips over.  She recoils, bracing for the flow of hot liquid but it never catches her. The coffee slides to the left and onto the floor.   Arlene looks on in amazement. 

“You really are impossibly lucky aren’t you?” 

“I… don’t know how that happened.” 

The two sit in silence while a bus boy arrives to clean up the spill.  It’s obvious he is struggling not to stare at Ania.  Only Arlene notices. 

Ania is busy looking at a warped reflection of herself in the window, beyond which lies the city in all its chilly confinement, air ready to fill with snow at any minute.    When Ania finally returns her gaze to her friend, Arlene is frowning. 

“I think we should go.  It’s probably nothing…” 

“What?”  Ania asks. 

“Up till now, I rationalized you were so much prettier than me because you were younger.  Now I find out your older… you lied to me…”  Arlene stops and gets up from the table.  “I’ll call you soon.  I need some time.” 

Ania sits alone for a moment before leaving. 

The cold hits her, cuts right through her jacket.  She wraps a scarf around her neck and places her hands in her pockets when something grabs her arm by the elbow, jerks her into an alley and throws her body to the ground, knocking the wind out of her. 

One man rifles through her pockets and purse, another stands at the foot of the alley on lookout.  The mugger pinches her chin between his thumb and forefinger. 

“What else you got?”  He asks.  He has wild, bloodshot eyes.  She feels the pain in her jaw, smells his awful breath; feels his body looming over her.

And then he is gone. 

A moment passes before she stands up and sees both men sprawled like road kill on the ground.   Her breath frosts in the air. 

“What…?” 

The men on the ground don’t even groan.  She wonders if they’re breathing but doesn’t want to find out. 

She leaves. 

As she rounds the corner, she repeats her cold weather procedure: tighten scarf, and puts her hands in her pockets.  This time, her hand grasps a paper that she didn’t put there.  

She takes it out. 

Spotykają mnie przy biblioteces.  

She can’t remember the last time someone wrote to her in her native language.  The cold finally seeps into her bones and she shakes to stop the chill running through her. 

The library is closed, she stands in front of the closed door and waits, watching random snowflakes make long, curved paths to the ground. 

She follows one to her eye level where it stops in mid air. 

Cars halt in the road, flashing lights get stuck in various on and off positions.  A red light stays red long past normal. 

“Hello Ania!”  A deep voice calls out, followed by heavy, shuffling footfalls and a stifled cough.

A large man, with enormous shoulders and thick arms appears from the darkness.  He is dressed in Dickies work clothes, the name Wiesnewski embroidered on his barrel chest.  He is smiling, a wide grin full of misshapen teeth.

 

“Steven?”  She says.  “What are you… why are you here?” 

His smile fades, but not completely. 

“I wanted to talk to you.”  He says.  “It has been a long time.”

Ania sighs. 

“Has it been long enough, Steven?” 

“Any time away from you is too long.” 

“No, Steven… no.  You don’t do this.  Not here, we are… thousands of miles apart.  You are still in Poland.” 

She walks away from him. 

“Now, Ania.  Now!  Now, there is only you and me.” 

She stops.  The red lights are still red.  The few snowflakes still hang without strings before her eyes. 

“What have you done, Steven?” 

He sits on the step and pats the place next him.  Reluctantly, she sits. 

“I stop time.”  He says.  “I keep you from spilling hot coffee, I watch you… help you.” 

She nods. 

“You are calling me as well? And hanging up?” 

“Yes.”  He flushes red.  “I am sorry.”

“How do you do this… stop time?” 

He reaches into a deep pocket and produces a small, silver-handled mirror.  Ania gasps. 

“You still…” 

“I do.  You left it home.  I find…” He holds it up, stares into it.  “…I find if I look long enough I can stop everything.  Everything is still. If I think of you too, you get to be here with me. It is all my dreams come true.”

“How?” 

He shrugs his massive shoulders and starts to cough. 

“Because I am a stubborn Pollock… like your mother say about me?” 

“More stubborn than smart.”  She says, her eyes on the mirror.  “You can stop time with this?” 

“Yes.  But only a few times.  I use it only when I have to.” 

“You stop time, you are young always?” 

Steven shakes his head. 

“No.  When I return, I think I grow old twice as fast. In old country, I never cough.  I never get sick.  Now I am sick all the time.” 

“You can concentrate, yes?  On anything? And it can happen?” 

Steven stares at her for a moment, and she feels his gaze heavy on her soul, like all the youthful energy of his past is focused on her, covering her up so she could see him as a child again; a child with thicker blond hair, blue eyes, and muscles that still held definition and purpose.  Her heart flutters in her chest like a tiny, singing bird for a moment, and she can feel her blood soar within her. 

He gets up and walks down a few steps until he can see her eye to eye. 

“Do you love me Ania?”  He asks.

She feels her chest tighten, caging the fluttering bird within her and closing her mind to its song.

“No.” 

He shakes his head with a slow, sad grace. 

“Then no, Ania… I can’t concentrate on anything and make it happen.” 

She stands, puts a hand on each of his shoulders. 

“Steven… You must… You must try.  We have to fight… think of my dead parents,  grandparents, my aunts and uncle.  All so old and weak and sick … poor, always with cold and no sun, there must be something we can do…” 

He doesn’t reply. 

“Steven.”  She pleads.  “At work, I see people are old and then dead… there must be something.”     

“I can read now, Ania.  I wanted to meet here to show you. “

“Stop, you act like a child again.  It is time to grow up.  You can do this… thing, and you do nothing but spy on me and accomplish nothing…” 

“Ania…”

“No, Steven… you were useless to me then and you are useless to me now… let me go…” 

He holds a shaky hand out to her.

“Please..” 

She covers her ears and shouts.

“Let me go!!” 

The suspended snowflakes fall to the ground in an instant, falling straight down despite the wind. 

She turns, but Steven is nowhere to be seen. 

++++

Ania goes about her life, her mirror, a string of dates with uninteresting and uninterested men, and she feels the presence of Steven on and about her always.  

When one day she is pushed out of the way of an oncoming vehicle, she whirls about yelling and cursing at everyone around her in Polish.  People scatter and whisper things she can’t hear, but her imagination fills in the words so she yells and curses louder.

Soon after, his presence vanishes and a strange loneliness creeps up on her. It brings no sadness, only a feeling of loss.

She works at the hospital, tending to old people who often die before she can get to know them.  On bad days, she speaks to them in Polish, hoping one may understand.  None do. 

Eventually, she finds Steven in the intensive care unit. The silver handled mirror rests on his bedside table.  A clear mask covers his gaunt face, his giant skeleton protruding from folds of yellow, spotted skin.  What’s left of his hair is white and his once brilliant blue eyes are gray through a film of white paste. 

The red light of a heart monitor jumps up and down slowly, as if reporting Steven’s life force was just too much effort. 

Ania puts a hand over his and it feels papery and brittle. 

“You do this to yourself?” 

He nods his head a fraction of an inch, and his heart monitor flatlines. 

Ania grabs the mirror and puts it over his face. 

“Concentrate Steven… save yourself, please!” 

The monitor stops.  An old woman waving to her family freezes in position.  A doctor holds defibrillator paddles above the chest of a patient.  No one moves.  

“Steven… can you speak?” 

His voice is only a whisper. 

“More stubborn than smart.” 

She laughs bitterly. 

“I’m sorry.  We can stay here… you and I.  You will get better and we will go back home.  I promise…” 

“No.”  He says.  “I am dead already.  You go… I am bad guardian angel, yes?” 

“No, Steven… you can concentrate.”

“I love you, Ania…” 

Before she can respond, Steven throws her back into time.  His heart monitor panics in a monotone shriek that pierces Ania’s ears and heart.  With the mirror still in hand, she covers her ears and backs away.  Doctors and nurses amass over Steven’s body and their hurried work plays out for Ania in horrid slow motion. 

+++

Ania sits in her apartment, staring at the silver handled mirror, a pale streak across one cheek as a tear runs across her skin.

Ania Wieczorek, a haunted woman who will spend the rest of her days looking into a mirror and trying to control something one can only read on a watch or a wrinkle, because Ania found out too late that time will always win, even in the Twilight Zone.

The Single Desired Effect

I’ve read and listened to Stephen King’s On Writing several times now.  I like to listen to it more than read it, it feels like Steve and I are just kicking back and having a discussion. You know, where he talks and I respond in my head.  Sometimes I give him advice.  Really.  

Days of horror stories gone by....

Anyway,   I’ve been reading him since fifth grade, good and bad, and I like that I can listen to him talk to me about his life and his work; kindly Uncle Stevey who will no doubt share his story because sharing his stories is what he does.

And some of those stories make me groan.  Some are just too long and silly: Under The Dome.  Some I’ve heard before in a thousand better ways: Dreamcatcher.  And some that are just plain BAD: Rose Madder. 

For every Salems Lot and The Shining, you have a howler like Geralds Game or The Tommyknockers.  Not that those novels are necessarily bad, just…King gone out of control?  Is that the best way to put it? 

So his novels are hit and miss for me, but the short stories continue to surprise.  Just After Sunset and Full Dark No Stars are some of the best reads King has produced in a long while.  And who else at his level is putting out anthologies?  It ain’t Grisham, and sure as fire ain’t Patterson. 

I genuinely like King's short stories and find them the highlight of his output, which is funny since he was the guy who went on for...what?  Twelve million pages about a dark tower on a flower?  Seriously, I hung with those books through Wolves of The Calla and grew so tired of them that my memories of the first few books changed.  I was in 8^th grade when I started them.  8^th grade.  Maybe they just make me feel old.   Regardless….

So to keep the short story love flowing….

Recently, I finished three great anthologies of short stories.  I mean SHORT stories.  Some so short I could transcribe five or six of them right now and it would only take a minute or two.  

One thing I brought away from it is how much FUN the reading can be.  You can’t stop doing it.   It’s the DORITO EFFECT, you don’t know you’ve had enough until you finish them or you puke orange.   

The anthologies are 100 Jolts by Mike Arnzen, Tiny Terrors by Robert Eccles and Rest Area by Clay Mcleod Chapman.  All are terrific collections of extremely short stories. 

Arnzen is a professor in the wilds of western PA and the man is an absolute dynamo of creative activity, setting off authorial Geiger counters from all ends of the genre  while skating around the edges of what you would expect from horror. 

100 Jolts has been around since 2004, and I’ve been wanting it since I first saw it advertized in Arnzen’s newsletter/blog Gorelets.  Gorelets, at the time, was a simple email dishing out Arnzens musings on whatever he wanted, and was among the first interactive websites for horror-related material. Though I haven't visited in a while, it's still in operation and hasn't lost a step over the years.  

“Notwithstanding the commercially successful novels of writers like Dickens and King, horror is predominantly a genre of the short story. Notably, both those popular writers mastered short forms first.  But before them, Poe – credited with both the invention of the short story as a genre and being a founding father of today’s horrific tale – predicated his work on the notion of the ‘single desired effect.’”

That “single desired effect” is all over Arnzen’s 100 Jolts, so much so that his stories live and die by the effect – if you don’t like the effect you don’t like the story, but don’t worry, it’ll be over in a second and you’ll be on the next one.

Be warned though, Arnzen doesn’t mess around with the descriptions of blood and gore, no one is immune here: babies, cows (yes cows), children, adults are all put through the Arnzen grinder. 

Robert Eccles' Tiny Terrors is a great companion piece and the two make for an overwhelming evening of short horror fiction.  While Arnzen is more poetic and experimental, Eccles is the Ambrose Bierce of tiny stories – sharp, humorous stories filled with some of the briefest, most disturbing vignettes ever.  The effect is jarring: one moment he makes you laugh and in an instant the knife is in your back.  It's so unexpected you don’t notice until the story is over and the blank space beneath is either laughing with you or at you.

There are werewolves and vampires, serial killers, ghosts and zombies – all the horror staples with just enough of a twist to make it all fresh and enjoyable and ultimately, not knowing what to expect –even from all your favorite horror friends, makes the book work so well. 

Eccles is also a great reader, with a deep, clear voice to translate fiction.  Before reading Tiny Terrors I heard him voice several stories at Liquid Imagination   and  Pseudopod.  Like listening to Stephen King, it makes you feel like Bob is right there with you, telling the stories to you and only you; giving the work a sense of intimacy.

In a similar vein, Clay Mcleod Chapman’s Rest Area is another fine collection of very short stories.  Chapman writes very, very short monologues that he performed in a theater or on radio. The stories go right to the edge of horror without veering out of control.

And if you ever get the chance to hear him perform one of these stories, your appreciation level will grow enormously.  I heard him read some passages from his novel Miss Corpus years ago at a Barnes & Noble in Richmond, VA and he is an astounding performer.

Ultimately, these collections of little stories achieve the “single desired effect” by making me feel like the authors are telling me stories around a campfire.  

Yes, it’s a cliché, but it exists for a reason.  A campfire, scary stories, a dark, starless sky, a clear dulcet voice and an imagination give me the pleasant shiver any good story, regardless of genre, should produce. 

End. 




 rest area by Clay McLeod Chapman 

tiny terrors by Robert C. Eccles  

100 Jolts by Michael A. Arnzen