Shadow on the Wall: Book One of the Sandstorm Chronicles

Elih, Turkey has established its own set of laws that seek to control and dominate the population, in the name of Islamic law.  This does, of course, effect women’s lives most of all, as the regime of the RTK (the ‘Morality Police’) targets women in an attempt to keep them docile and subservient.

Recai Osman is the heir of a billionaire who lacks direction in his own life.  Then, the unthinkable happens and he is forced to wander in the desert, alone and helpless until a Jewish father and daughter take him in to help him recover from injuries he has sustained and has no memory of receiving.  While in Recai is in their care, the RTK brutally attacks Rebekah, the daughter, and Recai is left to pick up the pieces of his newly crumbled and torn reality.

After years wandering the desert in search of a new life, Recai is drawn back to the life he abruptly left years before.  He returns with a new consciousness and understanding of the brutality and oppression of the ruling class of Elih.  It is then that he discovers that he must fight against the system in superhero fashion by protecting the women who live there.  While carrying out his vigilantism, he inadvertently draws more people into his plan of protecting those who need it.  Soon, there is a complex network that is aiding him and encouraging his efforts.

Tyler gives us a triumph in feminist literature, while supplying a believable ‘superhero’.  Recai possesses no overt unearthly powers, but instead relies on his faith in knowing of what is right and wrong.  In reality, he is just a man standing up for what he believes in, within the confines of the predetermined regime.  The humanity which is displayed throughout the story is what makes it a success.  Tyler is also not apt to shy away from graphically violent scenes to save those who wish to hide from the realities she discusses in the story.  While the graphic scenes are not what one may want to read and have so forcefully pushed in front of them, they are necessary to be delivered in such a manner in order to keep us from hiding from the brutal truths in the lives of her characters.

Shadow on the Wall is a brilliant work, in that it is incredibly real and simplistic in its delivery.  Tyler masterfully weaves complex issues of violence against women, religious oppression, and vigilantism into a cohesive, straight-forward look at the issues.  Every one of the many characters is equally important within the story, and their position is easy to sympathize with on some level- even if their actions are not.  This is a work that shows the extremes to which the ruling class will go to keep their positions solidified, as well as the ability to control the population with fear, domination, and violence.  This is a success in what is sure to be an engaging new series from a powerful new voice.

And Death Dreamt Us All
by Cheryl Anne Gardner
Twisted Knickers Publications
ISBN: 978-0982214541
Copyright © December 2011
$7.99 Paperback
$2.99 Kindle
138 Pages

ABOUT:

Rowan lives at the edge of reality. After witnessing a terrible childhood tragedy, her life has evolved into a shifting state of death and decay. Barely a night without restlessness, barely a breath without torment, she exists at the edge, her mind merely a footfall away from the abyss. Within that abyss stirs a creature so vicious, so evil, and it lies in wait, staring back at her, waiting for her to fall.

REVIEW:

Having read almost all of Cheryl Anne Gardner’s books, I always look forward to a new one and try to approach it with a clear mind and give it my full attention. This is because Mrs. Gardner’s novellas are often philosophical, poetic, and downright challenging to read. Her prose are full of lyricism and imagery that you will find both stunning and disturbing. And Death Dreamt Us All is no different.

Our protagonist is Rowan, a crime scene photographer, who convinces herself that she is numb to what she captures through the lens. She attempts to remain undisturbed by the human horror and atrocities that she snaps photos of. However, Rowan is instead disturbed by her ability to see evil, envisioning the killers right there who have committed the brutality, seeing everything through their eyes.

In real life, Rowan is sleeping with her therapist, Killy.  It’s a love-hate relationship fed my liquor, pills, and intense sex. Those who easily blush might want to turn on the fan and pour themselves a glass of ice water before sitting down with this book.

Gardner makes no apologies for the way her characters treat each other, emotionally or physically.  But she does have a sense of humor at times which cannot go unappreciated. There is one chapter where Rowan visits a strip club which had me laughing out loud. Her use of the most foul images and descriptions of not just a stripper’s body, but of the clientele who frequent this place, right down to the gay Adonis bartender, read so vividly like I was right there in the middle of it all.

Never one to be wax-poetic, the author gives equal treatment to the beauty and the grotesque.  At times reminiscent of Poe himself, visual sketches themselves would practically rob you of the sheer essence in art with words that Gardner has such a talent for.  There is one scene where a raven actually lands on the hood of Rowan’s car.  Those well versed in the classics can easily see where Gardner draws her inspiration. Here talent is evident in quotes like this from her lead female character:

While wallowing in the chaos of my life, I’ve come to know one true thing. I have seen the world. I have seen the demons: Formless. Timeless. Faith in absentia. I have seen absolute darkness. This is the only reality, the only truth I know. I feel as if I am just beginning to see a faint glimpse of the future – the real future. The end of days. I’m not getting it in any finite detail, but it is perceptible even in the dim light. I can see the action, the reaction, and the consequence, and I have become dreadfully aware of everything around me. I’ve always feared that someday I might be plagued by madness. It happens often enough in my profession, but I don’t think this is madness. One cannot be self-aware and mad at the same time. Can a madman know they’re mad?

And some may think, like her characters, this author is mad. Her writing is definitely not for the faint of heart. Like Poe, like Shirley Jackson even, she celebrates and studies the human condition, whittling it down to the bare bones and blood drops that frighten us but remind us what we are all made of.

Reviewed by Susan Anderson

Inside a Mind Gone Feral

FOUR D is a collection of four stories by Gregory Morrison that I would describe as speculative fiction.

While the author is a talented writer with a bright future, reading FOUR D was a painful experience for me. There were times of absorption as I groped for understanding, times of interest, especially in the first story, but most of the time I was perplexed, much as the first readers of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” or readers of, say, Albert Camus’ works must have felt.

In his opening remarks, the author tells us that the hero “lives in a world of disappearing people and objects, which might or might not be important.”

It was the phrase, “might or might not be important” that puzzled me. After reading the book, however, I decided that FOUR D was a wild ride inside of a mind gone feral, and that whatever meaning could be squeezed from the words, derived from such a tragicomic experience, but that meaning did not reside in the words themselves. Put another way, the author seems to be saying that there is no meaning, only life devoured by meaninglessness—what the author calls “space” in the first short story.

Some of my favorite works have a character similar to the protagonist in FOUR D, but there is always a foil, someone with a rational mind, a character of equal weight, but a lucid, caring, flesh and blood character, one who lends perspective. I didn’t see any such character in any of the stories so as a reader I felt like I was drowning.

At times FOUR D had a wry humor:

My mother sent me an apple pie with a card. “I’m scared,” it said. What does she mean? I’m scared too! She saw something else. Her phone stopped working, and now we are writing letters to each other. “How are you?” “Making a soup.” “I’m ashamed.” She mentioned the crow that had disappeared in front of her while flying by. It was the biggest event in her life; mine will be tomorrow.

Gregory Morrison is a talented writer of great promise. He writes in English, a language that is not his mother tongue and this in itself is an amazing feat. But while there were times of clarity and humor, in the end, FOUR D did not work for me because of its repetitive narrative, much of which could have been cut, because of its sometimes stiff language: what little dialogue it contained was cumbersome, for example, this telephone conversation,  location 1688:

“Hi, Bob!” “Hi, Luidgi, how are you? Everything all right?’ Bob had some worry and care in his voice. They all already know that we have split up, Luidgi was guessing. “Everything is just fine!” he answered. “Do you know what day it is?” “He’s busy; you know him. We are meeting in a restaurant called ‘P.’ I’ll text you the address.” “See you later, Bob.”

I applaud Gregory Morrison for attempting something radical. With revisions FOUR D could be cutting edge, but this edition falls short.

Note: there are some grammatical errors that were overlooked in the edition I read. In two places “sell” was used to refer to cell phone, and the following, location 224:

She changed her underwear and pulled her hear back with a hair band.

by Jeffery M. Anderson
CreateSpace
Copyright 2011
ISBN 978-1453870815
420 pages
$15.99 Paperback
$3.99 Kindle

To say that Jeffery Anderson’s dystopian, conspiracy-laden Ephemera is not for everyone would be an understatement.  To say that it is for very few would be more accurate, and those very few should consider themselves lucky to be given such a novel.  Ephemera is not easy to read- both stylistically and content-wise; maybe because a lot of what is happening in the future New York setting seems to be a distinct possibility.  While reading, it is just as easy to get tripped up and twisted around the surreal dialog and situations, as it is the actual plot of the story.  That is to say, if you are one who can understand what is going on long enough to get drawn into the world of Ephemera, you will not want to put the book down.  Nor will you be able to shake the feeling left behind after the pages are closed.

On the surface, Ephemera is a story about journalist Nester Cab, who receives a photograph and note of a fallen soldier, prodding him to find out what happened to him.  Through his adventures to find the truth of the story charged to him he becomes deeply enmeshed in a world unlike the orderly one in which we meet him.  Along the way he meets strange characters and stranger situations, evoking the surreal worlds of those such as Kurt Vonegut and David Lynch.  Nester becomes unsure of what is real and what will come next, as well as unsure as to what really may be important.

Underneath the obvious, this is a story about the decline of free thought, the imbedding of marketing in our daily lives, the validity of conspiracy theories, and how it all effects the personhood within us.  The dystopian world that is created becomes as real as our own- and just as possible, if things happen one way instead of another.  It serves as an almost cautionary tale of what we let in to our daily lives without question.

Anderson has given us a story that is not conventional by any means.  At times the reader will laugh, and just as soon find themselves crying about the absurdity of it all.  Although he has yet to hone the stylistic nuances of those he clearly emulates, Anderson is on his way to becoming the next leader of dystopian fiction.  There are times when some editing could be beneficial to the trajectory and fluidity of the story, but these do not distract too much from the story within.  Ephemera is a story of dark, conflicted characters set within a surreal metaphorical world that begs to be understood.  One must only ask if they are ready to understand.

In this hilariously clever satire written by Dan Spencer, Buddy What crashes into the lives of America.  Literally.  When a naked man falls from the sky in the exact middle of the United States, not remembering a thing about who he is, many are quick to find out the meaning of it all.  After a misunderstood conversation leads to the moniker ‘Buddy What’, it soon becomes part of his new identity, as his search for self begins.

Buddy What has no memory of who he is, from where he came, or where he was going.  He does not even remember how or why he fell to the earth, let alone why he did so naked.  In comes the unnamed narrator, local small-town news reporter, to cover the story and get his big break.  As the search for who Buddy What is progresses, his every action and comment is over-sensationalized, and leads to a cult following of Buddy.  His cross-country tour leads to more followers of the mysterious man with no past.  They soon dub themselves “The Forgetters,” in ode to Buddy’s amnesia, and his philosophy that in order to discover who we are we may have to first forget who we were.

By the end, the responsibility of being a sort of (reluctant) messiah pushes Buddy to seek solace from it all.  With no leads or signs of who he once was, he is left with the realization that he may become whoever he wishes.  However, the pressure of being in the public eye, as well as one who people look to for answers, all becomes too much for Buddy to bear.  After all, he never asked to be worshipped- he is only a man who fell from the sky and survived.

Spencer gives us a satirical look at organized religion and the quest for self in Be Now, Buddy What.  With a humorous observation of the willingness of people to place meaning upon the unexplained in order to feel more comfortable, Buddy What is a character with which we all can relate on some level.  It is a story of who we trust and why, as well as that of realizing how little we really know of those we let into our homes- and sometimes that is alright.  It is about giving someone a chance and helping them when they are completely lost in life and need it most, and about accepting a change within ourselves which those around us are bound to bring about.

The dialog in Be Now, Buddy What is perhaps the most entertaining part of the entire story.  It often leads the reader to feel as though they are stuck inside a riddle, wrapped in a conundrum.  The circular nature of nearly every conversation only adds to the feeling that the more we search for meaning, the more it is lost.  It seems as though Buddy does not realize how profound most of his statements are.  He merely says what he sees as purely logical, such as “I believe belief is nothing compared to what truly is.  And we’ll all learn what truly is in due time,” when one reporter tries to sort out Buddy’s personal religious beliefs.  At other times, Buddy leaves us with tidbits reminiscent of Yogi Bera, such as “Even moderation should be taken in moderation,” and “You don’t know what you’re missing till you’re missing what you know.”

Spencer delivers a story about religion, celebrity, life, and what we make of it all with a humor and succinct poignancy that is hard to find.  With dialog and circular logic that gives a nod to Kurt Vonegut and Carl Hiassen, this book is sure to entertain the reader to the last page- and have them laughing the entire time, as Buddy and his narrating friend fumble through their newfound celebrity and quest for self-awareness.  It is a relatable tale that will make one think long after having finished the last page, and perhaps not to take everything for granted- because everyone has the chance of falling.

Reviewed by Author C.V. Hunt

ABOUT:

Every morning the sun rises, waking Awful, Ohio, overlooking all of its residents, guiding them towards another productive and profitable working day. The economy is strong and the money is abundant, all of which are offered to whomever produces and profits the most product. The masses rejoice daily over the informed opportunity, with the exception of Troy Slushy.

Troy Slushy wakes every morning to the intrusion of the sun abruptly charging into his home, removing him from his enchanting dreams. The sun exposes his collection of worthless possessions, his depressed wife seeking salvation, his withering home struggling for support, and the life-decimating job that is undesirably forced upon him daily. This is Troy Slushy’s existence in Awful, Ohio, and because of this exposure to this monotonous misery, Troy’s enemy is the sun.

Heavily sedated by a dream-enriched epiphany, Troy removes his concerns for the demands and priorities of Awful, Ohio, replacing them with the objective of permanently removing the sun from his existence. He gathers his wife and begins a quest to save them both from their sun-exposed lives of suffering in Awful, Ohio, concocting plans and blueprints of various sun-destroying methods. Unfortunately for Troy, this proves to be easier said than done. But luckily, Troy discovers that perseverance is much more eminent in accomplishing a goal than feasibility, as he is able to assemble a massive scheme to achieve perpetual darkness, but not without affecting Awful, Ohio and all of its production, profits, and population.

REVIEW:

Troy Slushy wakes one day within a midlife crisis. He is miserable with how his life has turned out, and the sun shines every day to expose his failures. Troy’s ultimate correction for his over indulged life is to destroy the one thing that exposes his misery – the sun.

Troy lives in a world of overabundance. The economy is booming, unemployment is low, and everyone is spending money. We are shown the inside world of a factory where the owner is obsessed with efficiency. Your punishment for not working efficiently is humiliation, and your reward is the euphoria of gaining money to buy more stuff that you don’t need.

Jeff Neal makes it blatantly obvious that the story is based on materialism. Troy Slushy’s biggest objective is to rid himself of it one way or another, by destroying the sun that exposes it all. At first his plans are completely ludicrous and unattainable, but as the story moves on, he fashions a plan that could work, if the odds weren’t completely stacked against him. Another character’s biggest objective is to take out the materialism at its source, the efficient factory owner that pays out the cash in the form of weekly paychecks. The author’s depiction of store owners selling their products out of trash cans only hammers the basis of his story:

The judge was in bewilderment at what he was hearing. How could a human being not understand currency in exchange for prod­uct? The judge kept listening to Samuel Amiable’s ignorance. The boy had no parents, no home, or any documents verifying his iden­tity. Samuel Amiable had become the mold of a bum in the judge’s mind; an aimless vagabond stealing from the hard working store owners who were innocently selling items of fabricated value from their trashcans. The judge sat silently, building an image in his mind of Samuel Amiable haphazardly and deceitfully deconstructing all of Awful, Ohio’s honesty and integrity and values.

The strange descriptions of the characters left them looking cartoonish in my mind. Some are described as having flipper hands that are permanently wrapped around pistols, facial features that are pieced together like a drunken puzzle, and ponytails and ears that wiggle on their own, and attack other people.

I picked this book because the story seemed so outlandish that it had to fall into the ‘Madness’ category that I love, and I was right. I was reminded of something my editor told me once after only reading a few pages. Stephen King was quoted to saying: “The road to hell is paved in adverbs.” Luckily for Jeff Neal, the road is not paved with adjectives too.

Although I did find it somewhat repetitive, I didn’t mind the excessive descriptions. The author’s outrageous characters and unlikely story line create a cartoon quality to the story. The book was overstuffed with a lyrical web of depictions, and it left the story wanting to be a poem in my eyes. With a Dr. Seuss-like quality to the writing, and a Willie Wonka madness to the story, we get an idea of what living in Awful, Ohio is really like. This book takes you off a beaten path, and it may not be for everyone, but if you are looking for bizarre and different, then look no further.

More Boy Than Girl
by Tony Lindsay
Penknife Press
Copyright © January 2011
ISBN: 1599970074
130 Pages
$13.95 Paperback
$9.99 Kindle

Dai Break Jones is a business woman. But the business world is a man’s world, and as the title of Tony Lindsay’s book suggests, Dai has good business sense and is gonna do just fine.

And the reader quickly discovers Dai not only has business in her blood, but she has the street smarts to succeed as well.  And she needs that  because she’s a pimp!

Told in a first person narrative of street language with a real hip hop urban feel to it, you certainly get a sense of the gritty edge of Chicago’s street life which Lindsay wanted to convey.

In fact, you have a personal tour guide in the narrator, an unlikely one at that since Dai is actually a woman discussed as a man so that she can carry out the role as a pimp, a role usually dominated by men.

Most of my exposure to beat writing came in the form of open mic nights in coffee houses where African American poetry was often conveyed in a specific dialect or street rhyme.

I think that’s why I found Lindsay’s book so fascinating to read. In fact, it’s almost impossible to describe without reading it out loud, so for the sake of my review I’ll share a few passages.  Here’s one from the first page where Dai is describing one of the girls named Daisy:

There was no denying her ability to get out there and scoop the cream that makes the dream.  But what was different about Daisey was how she saw things. The girl was weird, but weird in a positive way. The ho’e looked for the good in everything. Like when it was raining, I would be pissed cause wasn’t no tricks on the strip and my money was low. The chick would say some shit like, ‘well the rain is good for the farmers, and if they get a good crop we pay less for food, so it will all work out.’

or this bit where Dai describes her father and his women:

My daddy loves to go out stepping on Thursday night. He dresses to the nines: beaver hats, tailor-made suites, ‘gators, the whole thing. He matches from head to toe. And each week he took a different woman out stepping, but that all changed after Cheryl moved in. Now it’s only him and her on Thursday nights, and she dresses just as sharp as him. She looks like nobody’s maid on Thursday nights.

This is a book where you really have to throw rules out the window when it comes to grammar and language.  So, it may not be a book for everyone when it comes to style. However, Lindsay’s style is very true and honest to his story and to his protagonist, Dai.  It feels very natural and reads that way too.

Adult themes involving sex are discussed so tread lightly, although some parts will definitely have you laughing out loud and not believing what you just read.  But if you are looking for a quick read that’s very different and definitely outside the box, then I highly recommend this read!

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!

When I first started reading Lance Carbuncle’s Grundish and Askew, I thought about those funny antacid commercials where the chicken wing or the pasta fights back by slapping the person in the face.  I felt like this book was slapping me in the face because I couldn’t believe what I was reading at times.

Grundish and Askew are best friends – two backwoods hillbilly redneck trailer trash good ole boys.  One works as a pizza delivery boy and the other works as one of those sad individuals who stands outside a JiffyLube wearing a sign to try to drum up business. They live in a trailer park, surrounded by pedophiles and sex offenders, with one lunged Aunt Turleen who bums smokes from nappy talking dogs in her dreams.

Grundish has spent time behind bars and he’s not going back.  No matter what happens, he’s made Askew promise to kill him before he ever gets arrested again. And he’s willing to do anything to avoid getting caught, including wearing a prosthetic penis filled with Aunt Turleen’s clean urine just so he can pass the drug tests that his sex-crazed parole officer subjects him to.

And when he’s not bumping uglies with her, he’s carefully breaking into empty houses and renting lots of pay-per-view porn or stealing frozen meat goods. Then he leaves his calling card – a toilet bowl filled with an unflushed bowel movement.

And this book is filled with much more toilet humor than that.  The first 100 pages or so had me rolling.  I wanted to laugh out loud, but also felt the need to blush at what I was reading.  Carbuncle goes there and beyond. As Grundish and Askew decide to get back at the “F—ers” who piss them off, they end up killing one of the sex offenders in their trailer park after they attack their neighbors with frozen hot dogs ninja style.

This sends them on the run where they hide out in another vacant house before deciding where to go next.  Their ultimate dream is to end up in Mexico to make some money so they can open a whore house out in international waters and grow weed.

Unfortunately, for me, this is where the book started to level off. The raunchy humor I’d been guiltily enjoying in the first third of the book tapers off and the book becomes more of a “Thelma and Louise” meets “Natural Born Killers” kind of read. Or it  could be that I’d just become so desensitized to their bad boy behavior in the beginning that by the time they attacked another “F—er” I wasn’t shocked at all. I was just ready for the story to move forward.

Carbuncle’s writing is flawless, and includes made-up words, mispronunciations, and even bizarre footnotes that are jokes within themselves that the author is having at his own expense.  It’s obvious he had a good time writing this and wanted the reader to experience the same.  And indeed I did.

There are some classic scenes in here that definitely make this book one of a kind.  I just wish the content had not lost steam half way through. Otherwise, be prepared to laugh, be prepared to turn red faced, and prepare to root for the underdogs Grundish and Askew!

Grundish and Askew won the 2010 Reader Views: Reviewers Choice Award.  Visit the author online at www.lancecarbuncle.com to learn more (and to look at his balls)!

It’s hard sometimes to decide where a review should start, especially when I’ve read a good book and I’m yearning to tell someone all about it.  The book encompasses so much, and I don’t want to leave anything out, but I don’t want to give the good parts away either. That’s exactly how I feel about Will Entrekin’s new novel, Meets Girl.

It’s a love story, but not a typical love story.  It’s boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl, but said girl doesn’t love boy back.  Quite literally.  I think the narrator even tells the reader those exact sentences early on. So now what?

We should start at the beginning, right?  Once upon a time… Cliché? Yep.  But as the book suggests, what are clichés good for if we don’t use them?  The book actually begins with the one sentence: Once upon a time I fell in love with a girl who didn’t love me in return.  From there, our narrator spends much of the beginning of the book addressing the reader directly, romanticizing those four little words and the importance of the fairy tales they often introduce where the guy usually gets the girl.

From there, the book takes the reader through the journey of how said boy met girl.  The girl happens to be Veronica Sawyer, the sister of best friend Tom Sawyer.  Does that name sound familiar? Our narrator, Boy, remains anonymous.  And since “Boy” and Veronica sort of grew up together, we traipse through their high school and college years quickly until we get to Boy working a temp job in New York and dreaming of writing the next great American novel.

With a little pep talk from Veronica, he sits down and pounds out the novel – a time travel piece – in two weeks and presents the manuscript to her as a Christmas gift.  On New Year’s Eve that same year, he meets a gentleman by the name of Angus Silver (Think Anthony Hopkins, Boy tells us.) who is an investor in “futures.”

Angus hands Boy his business card, but later offers him a most interesting deal.  He can either be a great writer or get the girl, but must give up one for the other. His choice. Doting that he was responsible for Shakespeare and Beethoven’s fame, along with many others, Angus tells Boy they too made a decision like that.  Beethoven wanted to write great symphonies, but Angus made him give up his ability to hear them.

The reader will immediately wonder if Angus is the devil and selling your soul is required, but Boy even comes right out and asks him that very question.  So now you are probably wondering which choice boy makes, right?  Well, I’m not going to tell you because that would give the novel away now wouldn’t it?

If you don’t like gushy love stories, don’t worry.  There’s actually two loves here and one is a love for writing.  Entrekin has developed some very inspiring eutrophy about the act of writing in general which will have you rooting for Boy to pick his book over Veronica.  Not to mention all the literary references that Boy mentions. Here’s some prose from when our narrator sits down to finish his book:

I want to say that I was breathing heavily and sweating profusely – wouldn’t that be cool? – because I want it to seem dramatically more difficult and strenuous that it actually was, but I wasn’t, because no matter how much author-types might want you to believe otherwise, that’s not what writing is about. It’s not the sort of debauchery that earned Bret Easton Ellis and Morgan Entrekin the legacies and reputations they deserve, nor the sort of Benzedrine-fueled sprint for which Kerouac is canonized; it is, in face, a solitary gig writers accomplish best on their own, alone in a room with nothing but a blank page as a challenge.

and this…

I think too many people regard writing and literature as spiritual and metaphysical, and my feeling is that for it to really work, you can’t feel you need to look beyond yourself for inspiration. The real process is finding the inspiration inside you and hopefully using it to inspire others, whether by word or by deed.

A lot of the book moves in real time which makes you feel like Boy is talking directly to you as if you are right there in the room with him.  He discusses songs he’s listening to and how they make him feel.  Even the titles of the chapters give you a glimpse at what’s coming next like you are watching a play: Chapter Four, in which the trouble really starts, and which introduces a gun about a mantle, figuratively if not literally.

And speaking of chapters, at one point Boy skips a chapter because he’s too upset about what happens in it.  That’s right.  No Chapter 11, but he comes back to it later because he realizes it contains some crucial information for the reader.

And for those who don’t mind love, the author gives us scenes like this…

…I read a theory that Heaven is merely an instant that comes at final moment of one’s life, so close to the end that sense of time and space would have already been irrevocably lost, which makes that instant technically last forever. I don’t know if I believe that one, either, but if it is the case, I would have given anything to have Veronica’s slender finger tracking reverently along that white page I’d dedicated to her be my eternity.

So it’s romance and fairy tales.  But it’s magic and whimsy too. It’s a writer’s lament and a coming-of-age tale (for lack of a better cliché.)  It’s experimentation and taking chances. It’s poetry and music. It’s love and art.  Boy says so himself…

How can people create anything passionate if they themselves have never once known it? How could any artist – and I use the term as lossely as it might be applied – possibly be expected to create great art without loving anything besides art itself? …We want to believe love is about compromise, quiet dedication over a lifetime, simple work at co-existing with another soul, and it is, certainly, but it’s about those things as it is about many things. Love is infidelity every bit as much as it is faithful, avaricious every bit as much as it is committed, belligerent every bit as much as it is patient. Without meaning beyond the colors, feeling beyond the words, art would be merely paintings and books just as a kiss would be nothing more than four lips pressed together.

I applaud Will for taking chances, not just with his writing style, but with the format itself.  This is not your normal love story as you might have guessed by now, and although the reader has been addressed and made part of the story by authors before, it comes naturally here for our narrator and it just works because he never once turns his back on the reader.  In the end, Boy even takes the time to explain to you what just happened and who everyone was, or at least, who they were based upon (in case you hadn’t already guessed by then). Will Entrekin’s Meets Girl is indeed art, in its truest form, and I love that about a book…about a boy….who loved a girl….who didn’t love him back.