Having read and reviewed James Hutchings’s Two Fisted Tweets I have to say that Mr. Hutchings is a master at microfiction. Able to tell a story in 172 characters or less in order to meet the Twitter guideline in TFT, Hutchings now treats his readers to longer pieces of work (but not too long) and poems in his new book called The New Death and Others.

Hutchings relies heavily on the use of anthropomorphism (look that one up!) and personification, giving human qualities and voices to abstract states and inanimate objects which presents many of his stories in almost a fable-like storytale feel that relies heavily on tongue-in-cheek humor and irony.

You’ll stop and scratch your head and ponder the meaning of many of his twisted little tales, or laugh out loud at the silliness which is exactly what Hutchings intended.  Here is an author that enjoys puns and jokes, and obviously enjoys entertaining others.  There are even foot notes in some of the stories which actually turn out to be additional jokes.

There are numerous poems throughout the book, many of which were inspired by other famous authors’ writings.  Definitely good reason to seek out the works he’s cited so that you can compare them and discover Hutchings’s meanings and reason for inspiration.

Here is one of my favorite short poems:

If My Life Was Filmed

If my life was filmed, it would
go straight to DVD
and someone who was famous once
would have the role of me
and if five stars meant ‘excellent’
you’d give it two or three
and most of those who rented it
would watch ironically.

Years later they would track me down
and do an interview.
They say “I heard you died,” and I’d
say “Yeah, I heard that too.”
“Is any of it fictional?”
“Perhaps a scene or two.
There weren’t as many ninjas, but
the rest is mostly true.”
If you are looking for some light, interesting reading and wish to be entertained (and don’t mind a lot of cats), The New Death and Others is worth a look and worth the buck!

Kimberly Kinrade and I have something in common.  We both write to free ourselves “from the tyranny of my words” as she says in a small entry in the beginning of her anthology, Bits of You & Pieces of Me.  I shook my head in agreement when I read that.  Her book is a collection of short stories, journal essays, and poems – a well organized file of information from deep within the mind of a writer. While I do enjoy reading such collections from indie authors, it is often hard to make a connection with any one piece since they are just a few pages.

Most of her characters in her short stories remain nameless, so it’s very easy for the reader to assume the author may be talking about herself.  If that is the case, then the book takes on the persona of a personal memoir for both the author and the reader and the “pieces of me” are shocking at times and definitely dwell past the surface letting us get a glimpse of who this author really is. If I am wrong, then these characters that have taken shape and form in Miss Kinrade’s mind, only to be given life on paper, demand center stage and I would like to see them panned out into longer pieces of fiction.

In one piece called “A Writer’s Mind,” the author even admits, I can have brilliant ideas, I may even be able to give voice to them, but can I bring them to the page and maintain the integrity of the thought?  That’s the greatest challenge. And the greatest joy.

Again, a statement I completely agree with as long as you integrate your reader.  At times, I thought Miss Kinrade had forgotten about the reader, or only scratched that surface I mentioned earlier.  On the page, she “tells” us what’s going on instead of “showing” us so we are often left out of the picture.  Sure, she lived it, she saw it, she said it, so the author has the advantage here of knowing what is going on.  It is an even greater challenge to be able to show the reader that joy you have, to paint a beautiful picture using only words, only black and white.  While we may want to stay true to our essays or journal entries, we sometimes still have to paint a picture.

As for the poetry, a well read person will easily catch on to some of what has inspired Miss Kinrade while she composed these essays and poems. With pieces called “Till Death Do Us Part” and “Death Be Not Proud,” they mirror pieces we have seen before, but there is no plagiarism here. Only the thought that you might have read that somewhere before.  So, unfortunately for me, some of the poems lacked originality. There is anger, sadness, desire, love, all the qualities of poetry we’ve read before that have become almost as cliché as the titles themselves.

My favorite piece is called “All I Ever Needed to Learn…” in which an unnamed person, possibly the author, contemplates how maybe she actually didn’t learn everything she needed to know in kindergarten.  She recalls her yearning for knowledge and is proud that she now sees that same yearning in her own children.  It is these life lessons no teacher can teach us.  The same can be said for talent.  A teacher can teach us the techniques of writing, but the creativity and art of it is often natural or learned from experience.  Miss Kinrade should be pleased as I can see both technique and creativity here.

At 120 pages, Bits of You & Pieces of Me is a quick read.  Most of the poems are less than a dozen or so lines long.  I enjoyed the moments spent with Miss Kinrade, the pieces that she revealed to me. But I would have liked to have seen a few bits more. A page in the back advertises a work of fiction due out later this year, The Reluctant Familiar: Book 1 of The Magicked Series.  I believe it may hold more promise for this author in being a longer developed piece, and I personally look forward to reading it. As for her freshman effort, the bits and pieces make up a decent picture as a whole that many anthology lovers will appreciate, but it left me wanting more in the end.

Having reviewed self-published books for over three years now, I appreciate the bizarre and unique.  I’m convinced we all have a book inside of us; some of us just have to be willing to break the conventional mold to write it.  I have huge respect for anyone willing to use POD technology to do just that these days.  And thank goodness for outlets like Smashwords.com that allow us to reach readers who might appreciate the same.

To think we once moaned about the formatting of page numbers and paragraph breaks in self-published books.  True Ebooks don’t have page numbers!  And while I still show concern for proper formatting, you have to applaud a book that steps outside those boundaries too and pulls it off successfully!

That’s exactly what James Hutchings has done with his book, Two-Fisted Tweets, available at Smashwords. While others out there have collected their personal Twitter tweets and formatted and published them, James has actually composed extremely short stories using the Twitter guideline of 142 characters or less, sometimes even dropping a period (.) at the end to meet the character count.

His book only contains 30 stories, so as you can imagine in PDF format it’s very short.  7 pages to be exact!

Forgot plot and POV and character traits.  Hutchings has given us extreme flash fiction at its best, presenting the reader with the bare essence of a story that you will ponder long after you’ve read it.  Here are a few of my favorites:

They withdrew his invitation to speak at the conference on stalking. But he knew they didn’t mean it.

“Mum, Dad,” said the nervous young vampire, “there’s something I have to tell you. I’m…sparkly.”

There are a few writers that I follow on Twitter who post thoughts full of irony or sarcasm or extremely short stories on a daily basis.  They break up the monotony of everyone else tweeting news clips or what line they are standing in every day, and most of all they make me smile.  They make me remember the punchlines  to share with someone in conversation later.  Who cares what the joke was, right?

So in keeping with Twitter rules (with 8 characters to spare), I’ll just say this…   Hutchings may not have a lot to say in his book Two-Fisted Tweets, but his 142 character stories speak volumes. I highly recommend!

I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing several short story anthologies published through Lulu, and I have to say that Jeremy Boland’s collection is one of the best.  Not only are the stories fresh and original, but the physical book itself is an excellent example of a self-published author getting it right.  That’s why I’m going to talk about the book quality first.

The book itself is the first from Lulu I’ve seen in person in the 4.3 x 6.9 size.  While the $16.95 price tag may seem a bit high for this deluxe “pocket sized” book, I’d probably still buy it at full price off a bookstore shelf.  Jeremy’s original artwork on the cover is also fun and colorful, and a bit humorous after you read the stories and learn who these characters are.

Inside formatting is pretty much tight and clean, although all of the front matter has headers and page numbers.  The title page is page 1.  This is a sure sign of amateur, but I didn’t even notice it the first time I sat down to read the book. It’s a common mistake that only other people and authors in the industry would notice. The book still has a classic look and feel to it, almost graphic novel-like. Jeremy’s website also echoes that look and I enjoyed taking a look around there after reading his book.

There are eleven short stories in the book.  The first, “Counting Sheep,” reminded me of something from an early Stephen King anthology like Skeleton Crew. A man is counting sheep to try to fall back asleep and this is timed with an intruder breaking into his house to kill him.

This is followed by another odd tale about a werewolf hunter meeting with his psychiatrist, a new twist on an old genre that has unfortunately been shadowed by all the recent vampire phenomenon. Speaking of classics, Jeremy also treats us to a flesh eating zombie attack paralleled to a strange love story.  And better yet, he’s included a spaceship/alien tale as well.

Science fiction, murder and mystery, horror and gore, there’s a bit of everything here for people who love the genre and prefer to read short stories.  Jeremy’s style is also very simplistic.  There’s not a lot of connection to be made with his characters, but sometimes that’s okay.  After all, they are short stories.  His may lack a certain depth, but I can appreciate that from time to time when I just want to be entertained and don’t expect to be thinking of the characters long after the last page. The only thing I would have liked even better is a few illustrations to really round out that graphic novel feel I got here.  Here’s a bit from the end of “Truckstop Unicorn”…

Was I fighting myself?  Was she fighting herself?  I don’t know the answer to that, I just know that I won. I’m here and she’s not. all that’s left is a sane man stuck in a crazy bitch’s body and all he wants is his life back.

It doesn’t even matter if it’s real or not. It doesn’t matter that life started out for me as some crazy fan’s fantasy, that I was only modeled after what she knew of you. All I want is to be back in my house, here. To go back to being the reclusive writer I remember being.

Overall, I found this to be a fun book that’s definitely worth checking out.  I love the look, it’s sassy title, and the feel of the book itself, and I enjoyed the stories inside as well. Mr. Boland has written and published a work that’s new and fresh to the genre, and worth a read! Check it out…

Visit the author online!

Read a preview of the book!

The Simplest of Acts: And Other Stories is a short collection of short stories. In only 102 pages, Melanie Haney manages to take us into the hearts and lives of eleven separate individuals. My hat is off to anyone who can write a short story, because as hard as I try, I am never able to limit myself to telling just a snippet of the story. Haney not only masters the short story format, but she also spins a tale rich with emotion which gives you a glimpse into another’s soul during those quiet moments in life. In The Simplest of Acts: And Other Stories, the story themes are primarily about loss and grief, however, there are moments of hope shining through. Life as seen through vignettes, Haney take you into the mind of her character, shows you what you need to see and feel, and then is off to the next story.

This is one of the few books that I have re-read before writing the review. I read it through the first time with complete enjoyment of the mastery of Melanie Haney’s craft, and then read it the second time through with an eye as to what to highlight for a review. Haney has a very strong voice which she uses in each of the pieces of first person, stream of consciousness style. She also picks those quiet moments in life, not the big parties or events, but the mother sitting at the side of her daughter’s hospital bed, waiting for the inevitable; the yearning to leave the small town life and see the world; the death of a cat; the loss of mind and more.

While I enjoyed every story in the book, I will only highlight a few of the stories which are my favorites. Haney opens the book with An Ordinary Evening, in which a mother is struggling to have an ordinary evening away from the hospital. Her daughter has been in a tragic accident and is a mere shell, and exceptionally unlikely to recover. We pick the story up at the point where the mother has maintained a vigil at the daughter’s bedside for months, only leaving to see a therapist at periodic intervals. The therapist is recommending Claire spend a normal evening at home, cook herself dinner, sleep in her own bed. In addition to this, Claire’s ex-husband wants her to consider pulling the plug because their daughter deserves to be put to rest.

I wake up alone in the bed we once shared, but didn’t last night. I muse for a moment how the conversation will go with Dr. Tanner. Will his calm and concerned expression hold steady, when I tell him our experiment in ordinary nearly ended with me sleeping with my ex-husband on the living room floor.

In Only in Bellington we meet Emmy, who is tired of working and living in a small town. She has been saving her money while working at Quality-Sure and once she reaches $10,000, she’s going to leave the dust of Bellington behind. Before her death, her mother always wanted to travel and see the world, and Emmy takes after her. While still $3,000 short of her goal, her father, who Emmy lives with, introduces a new girlfriend and Emmy considers that she has enough to move on. At the start of the story, Emmy is waiting for her break to be over, not joining those in the break room.

….. It smells and it’s loud with her coworker’s constant chatter. Who’s sleeping with who this week? Who did what in the storeroom? Where’re they going drinking this weekend? None of which matters to Emmy. She’s here for her paycheck, the weekly reminder that she’s one stop closer to leaving this town.
This town is Bellington. It is five thousand people living in five square miles of houses built practically on top of one another and a one-way Main Street that’s a quarter mile of Mom ‘n Pop stores and one Quality-Sure (purveyors of all your drugstore needs at low prices you can count on.) There’s only once chain restaurant, a McDonalds built in the sixties, whose owner panicked when rumors blew into town that a Burger King might franchise out their direction. It never came though, and to this day, Emmy asserts it as proof that you can’t have it your way in Bellington.

Only in Bellington and The Simplest of Acts are both award winning stories. The Simplest of Acts centers around the death of a beloved mother and Eve, the oldest daughter, visiting the house prior to the funeral to gather inspiration for writing the eulogy. This story in particular hit home with me as it seems that I have been to too many funerals, and the preparation that comes along with them.

One of my favorite stories in the collection is Shoes, Falling because while having a realistic view of what can happen in life, it is also the story which has the most hope, and is a little more lighthearted than the rest. Daisy, a paycheck to paycheck waitress, has fallen into a construction hole at her apartment complex and broken her ankle. Daisy is an optimist, and definitely someone who practices making lemonade when life hands her lemons. She lives in the apartment complex with her daughter Theresa, who sometimes becomes a little exasperated with her mother’s optimistic view. Perhaps I enjoyed this story so much because Daisy reminds me very much of my own mother, and like Theresa, I am ever trying to get her to see the world in a realistic way and to protect her from being taken advantage of.

The only criticism I have with The Simplest of Acts: And Other Stories is the formatting of the book. The lines are double spaced and the paragraphs are not justified. This is not significant enough of an issue to keep anyone from reading it. Reformatting the book would reduce the page count even further, which would allow Ms. Haney room to include a few more stories. Which would be a good thing because what I wanted most after reading all of the stories was more. A fantastic job by Melanie Haney.

Preview The Simplest of Acts on Amazon.com

Preview The Simplest of Acts on Lulu.com

I remember coming across a blog post about this contest last year, and I thought about submitting something.  But at the time, the deadline was fast approaching and I didn’t have a short story which I would describe as “Southern Gothic.”  What is Southern Gothic you might ask?  The contest description pointed interested parties to the Wikipedia definition which states the following:

Southern Gothic is a subgenre of the Gothic writing style, unique to American literature. Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. Unlike its predecessor, it uses these tools not for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South.

That being said, the first place winner, Kerry Donoghue, definitely deserves the award for their short story called “The Pearl.”  I admit it.  At first I rolled my eyes at the title alone because the first thing that came to mind was the Steinbeck book I was forced to read in high school.  Just goes to show you can’t judge a story by the title because Donoghue is far from Steinbeck – if not better.

Meet Harlan and Jezebel (it doesn’t get any more Southern than that, does it?).  They are brother and sister.  Harlan, a drunk with a bad eye,  works on washing machines.  Jezebel cooks dinner, practices diving in the Mississippi river and enjoys watching Wheel of Fortune.  Yep, the two of them are beaming with stereotypical deep south traits, but Donoghue does not poke fun at them.  He embraces them and gives them a voice with dialogue I’ve definitely  heard before back home in my Mama’s kitchen.  The narrative comes alive with odd imagery that you don’t know if you should admire for being so vivid and real, or laugh at for being so absurd:

Harlan stretched his long legs and felt the perspiration river along the backs of his thighes, through the tangles of leg hair, into the dark valleys of his jean shorts. It was only noon and the heat was just getting started. After another sip, Harlan ate his sandwich and from the weedy riverbanks, watched his sister with his good eye.

Harlan is more interested in his next bottle of gin while his sister wants to travel to Australia to go pearl diving.  What she doesn’t know is that Harlan has been saving money from his various fix-it jobs to pay for her trip but when a bar brawl lands Harlan in jail, his savings has to be used for bail.

The 2nd place winner is “The Long Way Home” by Drew McCoy and it reads like a long stretch of Faulkner inspired rambling, only Faulkner did it better.  It’s the story of a son on the way to pick up his father who is being released from prison. According to the author’s website, this short story was also written as a play, and it definitely reads like it.  There is no use of quotations to set off any of the dialogue.  I’m not sure if it was meant to be like that or if it was a typo.  It takes up 26 pages of the total 130 in the book, which was about 25 too many for me.

“The Accident” by Connor De Bruler takes 3rd place for a haunting story that reflects the likes of Flannery O’Connor.  It’s only six pages long and follows a mysterious driver who believes he’s hit a dog on the road.  He puts the dog in his truck and continues driving into town to seek medical attention for his passenger.  The story echoes a camp fire tale made of urban legends, but lets the reader down a bit with a single typo that sticks out like a sore thumb right in the last lines.

Seven runner-up stories follow, all of various southern characters and plotlines, any of which deserved at least 2nd place more.  “The Last Confession” by Patrick Brian Miller follows a priest whose been assigned to take over a small country church in a tumble weed town.  His first visitor to the confessional is one that he, and the reader, probably didn’t expect.  “Cut Through Road” by Chris Deal is the first person narrative of a mentally challenged character who gets some unsuspected help from a crook and the opportunity to pay him back.  It reminded me of Alice Walker or even Faulkner’s Benjy from The Sound and the Fury.  The story itself is quite simple, but the voice of its single character is so sad and honest that it makes this story quite memorable:

I was stopped by a couple of white men in a knocked up truck. they pulled up beside me and got out, a taller boy with bright red hair and a shorter, blond one. The blond one didn’t have no shirt on and had a drawing on his arm of a naked lady. The tall boy had a knife and told me to give him my money.

I said i needed it for a biscuit. I walked up to Pucket’s about once a day except for Sundays for a jelly biscuit and a Coke but that tall boy just told me to give him my money.

They came close and the blond one took my hand in his and twisted it up beyond my back and it hurt. The tall boy put that knife to my belly and said he weren’t going to ask again.

I have to comment on Mr. Morledge’s format of the book – the good and the bad.  The price of the book on Lulu does not match the listing on Amazon.  I also thought the book’s cover was a tad boring and didn’t really have any “Southern flare” to it. But for a self-published book that is being advertised under his publishing company, the book’s format is quite impressive.  Everything from his logo on the title page to the font of the headers gives the book a very professional feel.  If only the book had been edited a bit more closely, I’m sure it would be a collection that even someone like Tennessee Williams would enjoy. Congrats to all the winners!  Overall, it is an anthology to be quite proud of.

I first discovered Mick Rooney’s writing last year when I reviewed his book Academy.  Mick, like me, keeps informed of the POD world and its regular developments, often covering very informative topics in his author blog which I have read religiously over the past year.  Mick kept me posted on his next book, Filigree & Shadow, published last November, but I waited so that it could be one of the first books I devoted attention to this year.  Like Academy, I knew it would be a book of historical and hypnotic proportion, and Mr. Rooney certainly did not disappoint.  He opens with a very honest author’s note which I just have to point out because, to me, it’s like that black screen and bit of silence that makes you hold your breath right before a really good movie you’ve been dying to see is about to start:

We should be honest with each other from the very beginning. I am not a storyteller. The following work makes no attempt to satisfy the modern reader’s obsessive consumption of plot and character. Go no further; I have devoured everything I could find. However, if your appetite is satisfied, and you are interested in the shape, colour, texture of words and ideas, step inside; we have much work to do.

An introduction follows, noting that back in 1995 Mick got together with a musician friend and played around with putting his stories to music for a demo tape.  Artists he’d been listening to ended up inspiring his very words, as music often does for many of us.  Just before writing this review, I was discussing with another reviewer what kind of music was recently inspiring her new writing project and the effects it can have on our characters.  Mick ends the introduction with a line that has resonated in my mind ever since I first read it a few weeks ago:

Through my work, in exploring and discovering cruelty and beauty, I have learned that there will always be music and words to accompany the cruelty and beauty in life.

The first short story in the book is called “Arcadia,” and it’s more like narrative poetry than a story at all.

Say first, then, for heaven’s sake, hide nothing, not the horror tracks of hell. Say first, then, what tortures and curses her wretched young soul. Say how it was in the beginning when hell’s fires burned unequalled.

It’s a dreamy tale of the heavens, mountains, skies, and stars.  My only qualm about it was the continuous use of the words “dwindling light” on almost every page.  “The Eternal” which follows next is just as elegiac and trance-like.  Mick has a way of keeping his sentences short and simple.  There’s not a lot going on on the page, but the places he takes you in just a paragraph or two can paint such vivid images behind your eyes.

She bathes daily in the cool water of the river. The fish do not swim away from her. They are used to her body. To them, it is just like the pebbles and rocks on the bed of the river; smooth and perfectly coloured and curved. All is calm when she bathes in the foamingwater of the fast-flowing river.

The almost stream-of-consciousness style is unique in that the unknown narrator is telling the story to the characters as if they have been unaware of their own actions…”You did this and went here and you said this.”  The narrator is almost demanding and yet with a cadence to his tale that comes quite naturally.  A genius story that I would love to hear Mick read out loud.  It definitely made me wonder what kind of music he used to record it.

My favorite in the anthology is “A Spiraling of Winter Ghosts.”  The story is just as haunting as the title suggests as Mick takes the reader in and out of reality along with the central unnamed character.  A dwarf is mauled by a circus lion and just a few pages later we are spying on two lovers in an intimate moment.  Waves crash against a light house and drown an old man.  A pendulum swings, reminiscent of Poe himself and some tale of specters he would weave.  Like the stairs on the cover of the book, each piece of the story is different, but the same, and all connected perfectly  to reveal an overall theme that almost doesn’t make any sense until you reach the last page.

There are eight somewhat lengthy stories in all.  Each could stand on their own and have been previously published at different times, but they all work together magnificently creating an overall museum of vivid images and plot lines that deserve to be called nothing but Filigree and Shadow.  Mick leaves a lot up to the reader and relies on a good imagination to cover the lack of physical action and dialogue.  The best way I can describe this book is to use some of Mick’s own words from the very beginning of the story “Children on the Hill.”

Deep into a world of dreams. Real dreams of sail and stillness. Real dreams of uncharted worlds and words. The very dreams which have pulled at the heart of me, age upon age. Deep into those worlds and words where bare thoughts emerge. For so long, they have rested there; hidden away without being born, without a glint of light, without mercy. These real dreams have finally found the light.

Bathroom duty has been the subject of many books, mostly targeted toward children.  Some of my favorites are The Gas We Pass and Everyone Poops.  But just search the word “poop” at Amazon and you’ll find books for adults as well.  Dan Marvin’s book, Briefs for the Reading Room, is one such book, but don’t worry.  It’s not about what’s in the bowl, but instead is a book designed to give you something to read while waiting for the end result.

In Dan’s introduction, he jokes that we probably spend about 14 years of our life in the bathroom.  I tried Googling that theory to see how close to the truth he might be.  The first answer I found to my question of how long do we actually spend on the toilet was “Depends if the book I’m reading is a good one.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself.  And at long last, an author has created a book of “micro-novels” specifically designed to make better use of the time we spend on the throne or “in the library.”

As Dan puts it, “I jump right to the good part, wrap it up in a hurry, and let you get on with your life.” Each story is indeed only 1 or 2 pages long, so you can get through several in…ahem…one sitting.  There’s no character development, no plot set up, no pages and pages of setting, description, or flashbacks to mull over or flip through.  If you like flash fiction, it doesn’t get any flashier than this!  I’ve never tried to write flash fiction myself, but have often read it (some good and some bad).  I know it’s all about size (often less than 200 words) and content (you try telling a good story in 200 words or less).  And I also know Dan Marvin is a genius at it.

There are over 100 tiny tales to get you through some “difficult times.”  Dan’s subject matter ranges from fantasy, to courtroom drama, to mystery, to children’s themes, to just good ole thought provoking fiction.  After about the first 20 stories, I found myself going back and rereading them to figure out if I had missed anything.  I wanted more.  Indeed, in less than a page I was completely engrossed in the character and wanted more from them.  But again and again, I was expecting too much.  Be warned!  Many of the stories will “just be getting good” when they suddenly come to an end, leaving you to wonder what the heck happened.  But that’s the beauty of a book like this; the author wants you to think about each story long after you finished it.  Dan has done a superb job of keeping the stories concise and detailed enough for you to draw your own conclusions.  There is not a single word wasted!

One of my favorites is called “A Victim of Circumstance” in which a quirky Private Eye receives a note from his secretary that something is about to fall on him.  He’s such a good Private Eye that he ponders the note a little bit too much:

I studied the message Lila had given me. It was printed on a “Here’s your Message” Post It note, the kind that one comes off the top and it sticks to stuff but not too tight because you will want to throw it out eventually. You know the type. It looked familiar, much like the paper Lila usually uses to give me messages. That was it! It was a message from Lila, the kind I usually got! Now we were getting somewhere. That’s where you are arriving at a place different from where you were earlier.

Just when the reader (and the detective) should be more concerned about what is about to fall on him, the story comes to a dot dot dot ending right when the detective finally looks up. He never knew what hit him, and neither do we!  But that’s the beauty of writing like this.  We aren’t supposed to know.  The author focuses the reader’s attention on something else quite trivial that in a regular length novel might not otherwise be brought to light.

The majority of the stories also start with a quick and fun introduction almost reminiscent of a sketch comedy show, or a Hitchcock monologue, even Masterpiece Theater…”a hard hitting expose by Dan Marvin, fiction about fiction by Dan Marvin, an epic saga by Dan Marvin, visionary prophecy from the mind of Dan Marvin.”  The list goes on and on.  Add to this some tongue-in-cheek quotes or comments as footnotes at the end of many of the stories as well.  Here are some of my favorites…

This space left intentionally blank.

Phabricated Philosophy – Time goes quickly when you’re having fun. Therefore, to
live a really long life, you should never have any fun. So stop reading this book
and go eat Brussels sprouts or something.

Fabricated Factoid –
78 – Percentage of travelers in recent poll that thought customer service of major airlines had declined in the last five years.
100 – Percentage of major airlines who would never admit it but think deep down that passengers should just stop whining already.

Rent this space! Your ad here!

Erroneous Excerpt – “’Nevermore’ quoth the Raven, after eating a greasy hamburger, fries, and a chocolate shake all in one sitting.” -Edgar Allen Po’boy

Now, for those of you who may be blushing from all of this bathroom humor, don’t worry. You can read this book anywhere.  Dan even gives you a list of places to try it out…the car wash, the soccer game while your kid is on the bench, the dog park, even the operating table two minutes before your anesthesia kicks in!

Move over Uncle John’s Reader and make room for a new book on top of the tank.  Dan Marvin’s Briefs for the Reading Room is a perfect gift for that quirky uncle always telling jokes, or for that friend whose attention span ends at around 30 seconds, or a book you should just treat yourself to when at the end of the day you want to read something but don’t want to commit to a book that’s too heavy.  I give it 5 star flushes!

Insert predictable bowel movement jokes here.

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Matthew Rowe is a recently short-haired, neurotic lay about who is currently unsure of his place in the world. He hopes this book will go some way to asserting himself somewhere. He has written a lot and he wants to share it all, but no one with the money or power has let him as yet. He’s only in his late twenties though so he remains foolishly optimistic. Some people think it is endearing.

As a POD author, I can certainly relate to Matthew’s feelings about wanting to be discovered.  Unfortunately, most of us know that isn’t always going to happen when you self-publish a book.  SELF isn’t part of the word for nothing because that’s exactly who is going to have to do all the hard work if you want to succeed at it.  Yourself.  But Matthew’s book, Not All of Them About Zombies, has a four star rating over at Amazon.com and Amazon UK with four various reviews on each site.  As I write this, his Lulu rank is 8,849.  It may not be much in the way of being discovered, but it’s definitely a nice bit of success.  And it is much deserved.  Mr. Rowe’s non-Zombie book is quite the eccentric collection of short stories which are both entertaining and well written.

The book is a collection of 10 stories and one very short poem.  Believe it or not, the poem is the only thing in the book really about zombies and it is so short and sing-songy that it doesn’t really even belong here.  Although there may be some underlying joke between this fact and the title of the book itself, if I was Matthew I probably would have used the poem as an introduction to the book and changed the title to Nothing About Zombies or maybe even Nothing Against Zombies.

Speaking of an introduction, this book has a preface and a lengthy intro.  In the preface, the author goes into more detail about landing an agent and getting published, but using POD to showcase his talent and to hopefully get noticed.  This is followed by an introduction where he discusses what inspired each of the stories in the book.  In my opinion skip all this, the first 24 pages of the book, because this author does actually have talent and the stories are much more worthy of being read rather than the young writer rant presented on the first two dozen pages.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  It’s anthologies like this one that really take useful advantage of the POD publishing process like what Lulu has to offer.  I’ve read and reviewed several short story, essay, and poetry anthologies since the beginning of this blog, and haven’t found one that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy.  Unfortunately, books like these are often passed over by agents and traditional publishers because of their lack of appeal to a mainstream audience.  Visit your local bookstore and ask them to direct you to their anthology section and see where they take you.  Short story collections and literary essay anthologies are usually stashed next to the poetry.  The bookseller will probably put Frost or Dickinson in your hand if you ask for a poetry collection, or someone like King or Sedaris in your hand if you ask for short stories; or they’ll hand you some once featured collection (destined to become a bargain book) which was probably published in the 80s or early 90s which contains stories from authors I guarantee you’ve never heard of.  Despite the erotica market really “embracing” the short story collection format lately, books like these are a dying breed.  So kudos to Mr. Rowe for at least finding the right audience and the right place to showcase his work.

One good use of his introduction is that the author clues you in on the different styles and experimentation he was going for while writing each piece, while not giving too much away.  For instance the first short story, “Selling Liberty,” challenges a reader’s interpretation of a character after being introduced half way through their scenario and not necessarily knowing what happened right from the beginning.  Rowe’s idea for this story came while watching a movie, and demonstrates the often intriguing things a writer encounters and finds inspiration in.

My favorite story follows this one.  It’s called “The Happily Ever After.”  After studying children’s literature, Matthew decided he wanted to write an update to a classic and he chose Little Red Riding Hood in which Red is all grown up and challenged with possibly making the same mistakes she did back when she was a child.  First of all, I’m a huge fan of authors who use any character or person we may already know from history or from another story and puts them into a new adventure.  Michael Cunningham was a genious at this with exploring the life of Virginia Woolf in his acclaimed book The Hours.  Rowe’s use of the Red Riding Hood story is both original and noteworthy because he has written it in the exact same fairytale-like feel as the original is usually told.

My next favorite is called “Just a Fluke,” and is pure Twilight Zone at its best in which a man wakes up to find himself trapped inside of a woman’s body.  Get your mind out of the gutter!  It’s not that type of story, although the short entitled “Au Naturale” is.  With it, the author has penned a fine piece of erotica that’s worthy of Playboy confessions, if not better.

Traditional horror topics of immortality and also werewolves are covered, along with the Grim Reaper himself who appears in Rowe’s featured tale called “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”  It was the story of the month in November 2005 at Dark Fiction UK.  It follows a man who envisions himself as the reaper and uses his authority to target certain others who he thinks should die.  If you were a fan of the television series, Dead Like Me, you will definitely enjoy this one!

As I’ve said, Rowe’s take on supernatural and fantasy is original and whimsical.  Forgetting a lack of brain eating zombies which has been done again and again both in writing and television, I was much more content with the themes and subjects Rowe chose to cover instead.  He is indeed a promising young writer who deserves whatever acclaim comes his way.  Keep up the good work, Matthew!

I can’t resist a good short story anthology. I love being able to sit down with a collection and read two or three stories, and be able to walk away from it for a few days if I choose and not feel like I’m missing out on something. I’ve got closure in a matter of a few pages. For me, writing a short story is a nice way to get a character out of my head who I’ve been thinking about, to expel some creative energy that’s dying to get onto the white page. Novel writing is a long slow journey, and just as prosperous, but sometimes we need that quick fix. A short story is a cup of coffee in the early morning, and Matthew Kerry’s book of shorts is a whole pot!

Footsteps in the Darkness is a collection of stories each playing on a variety of themes which surprisingly relate. I was quickly reminded of Will Entrekin or Paul Ciccone, both authors who have been reviewed here at LLBR. We all know that short story collections and poetry make difficult books to get attention to in the traditional markets. Just visit your local Barnes and Noble and peruse these sections. Chances are there aren’t very many shelves devoted to them and if there are, they are stocked loosely and with older well-known short story writers such as Flannery O’Connor or poets like Emily Dickinson.

But it can happen. Stephen King has been very successful with his short story collections such as The Night Shift, and take a look at what makes up most of the erotica and GLBT market these days. Entrekin, Ciccone, and now Matthew Kerry all prove that the art of the short story is alive and well. And it is indeed an honor to find such outstanding writing among us at Lulu.com.

Matthew begins his collection with a story called “The Bigger Picture.” It’s the story of an awkward meeting between a newspaper photographer and his chief editor. The author’s vivid attention to detail is what makes this story work.

The Editor stormed through the room. Eyes peered up fearfully from shimmering computer screens and watched him stride past the desks from which loose papers fluttered and whispered to the ground in his wake. The door slammed behind him, causing the windows to shudder with the vibration and cups of
coffee to ripple and shimmer. The reporters, columnists and sub-editors exchanged long, raised eyebrow glances full of relief that it was not their turn.

Next is a piece called “Hard Copy,” which deals with plagiarism and which any writer can appreciate. It begins with the description of a nameless female taking time to enjoy nature and her surroundings outside a bustling city while making her own paper to bind into homemade books which she has written. Oddly enough, there’s a few lines about photography which resonates the meaning behind the first short story previously mentioned.

Similarly, photographs do not give a true depiction of life. They are convenient and useful but life is never fixed, people never stand posing with fake smiles glued to their faces and birds are never stopped midflight, hanging in midair. Attempting to pin these things down to something so one-dimensional and motionless as postcards and photographs means that they lose the pulsing vibrancy of life and transiency that makes them so special to begin with.

The story turns to a man in the city who has obviously acquired one of the woman’s self-published books. It’s a classic, and he intends on retyping it into an acceptable 8×11 Times New Roman formatted manuscript which he can sell to a traditional publisher as his own. But what he soon finds out is that it’s not always the words on the page that give a story it’s value. It’s how they are written.

Four more brilliant stories follow which are just as good, if not better, than the ones I’ve chosen to tell you about here so far. The last story is the one for which the book also takes its name. It is the story of four travelers seeking shelter from a violent storm. They come upon a church where an elderly priest offers them refuge. They repay the priest for his hospitality by doing odd chores the next day to aid the priest and fix up the church. The next day, more visitors arrive revealing the four earlier travelers may not have been as courteous as the priest mistakened them to be.

The abrupt ending, a foundation for all of Kerry’s tales here, leaves the reader to ultimately decide what comes next. Like the photograph theme in the first story, it’s only a snapshot of life which the reader gets to be a part of for a short while. And you will want to be a part of it. Treat yourself to the free download or support this Lulu author by purchasing the paperback edition of Footsteps in the Darkness. Either way, you will not be disappointed!