The LL Book Review

Entrekin
by Will Entrekin
Copyright: © 2008

163 pages
$5.00 E-book
$12.79 Paperback
One dollar from the sale of every book goes to the United Way New York City.

Will Entrekin’s self titled book, Entrekin, is a book that has had some exposure already. Upon writing this review, I have not taken a look at his popular MySpace page. Nor have I read the PODler review he links to on the book’s page at Lulu. Having read Mr. Entrekin’s book for myself now only validates why I started The Lulu Book Review in the first place. This is a POD book with lots of heart and character. It’s well polished. It is good writing. And it deserves to be read. I told Mr. Entrekin in an email that the cover sold me. If I had eventually come across this book on my own, based on the cover and the blurb on his Lulu page, I would have bought a copy. Great job at making this book your own, Will!

It is important first to look at the layout of this book since it is a collection of the author’s work. It is an anthology of short stories, some fictional and some nonfictional, interwoven with some poetry. Entrekin begins with a short story called “For Cynthia” in which the author meets a girl in a bookstore and briefly begins seeing her. He falls pretty hard for her only to have her call it quits, but they can still be friends. There’s nothing new to this story you haven’t read before. But the author does a brilliant job of leaving the reader hanging, just as humans are sometimes left hanging when a relationship abruptly ends unexpectedly. He has captured that moment perfectly, gently exposing himself right on the page. The best line in the story is, “Maybe home’s just not as familiar as I thought it would be.”

Next is an award winning poem called “This Ain’t Wonderland.” Yes, it’s about Alice and the White Rabbit. Each verse describes an all too familiar scene from Carroll’s beloved work, but then the author hits the reader with a line that compares it to real life. For example:

I was expecting

to eat myself small

and drink myself huge

but didn’t realize

I was already just the right size.

I love the sense of discovery here and how the reader can definitely relate. Using Alice in Wonderland as the metaphor is genius because it’s a story we all know well. My only problem with it was the repetitiveness of “I was expecting…but didn’t realize.” I would have liked about every other verse to be something different just to avoid the predictable repitition of these words.

“Dear Author” is a short story that begins with another dreamy relationship. The true heart of this piece begins at the bottom of page 17. The narrator begins to compare his love life to the anticipation of waiting for a literary agent to send an acceptance letter….

The day my letter comes, I’ll be expecting to open that envelope and find it addressed to Author. But it won’t be. It will say Dear Mr. Entrekin (that’s me)…

Any writer can relate to this feeling. We all have strong relationships with our writing and our characters from time to time. Will writes…

Somewhere, somewhen, there is a letter, and it is addressed to me. I just worry that all the rest will be addressed to ‘Author’, and I’m tired of opening the mail.

This book truly starts on page 27 with a short story called “Deluded.” It’s an entire piece about a writer dealing with query letters and rejection. Entrekin has a talent for putting the reader exactly where he wants them. He doesn’t cloud his writing with lots of needless words. He “shows” us, instead of “telling.” Take the opening lines for example:

My crummy little Jersey City apartment. Baldwin Avenue. Near Journal Square. Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, lived less than a mile from me.

I read these lines over and over to myself. Entrekin doesn’t tell us what the apartment looks like or what the view from the window is, but he doesn’t have to. And yet, when you read these sentences you know exactly how that apartment looked. I, myself, wondered if maybe the narrator ever passed the hijacker on the street. But that’s not important here. In so few words, he has given us endless visions of curiosities. It is what makes this short story work so damn well. He goes on to say everyone knew him as a writer.

The sometimes poet, the editor of the literary magazine: everything short of the tweed jacket with the elbow patches, basically.

Again, a simple detail like that jacket gives the reader a specific vision of who this character is. As a writer, I also related to his anger over the rejection letters, thinking you did your homework, sitting there and waiting, only to end up with rejection. This was probably my favorite piece of the collection.

Mr. Entrekin also dabbles into historical fiction with two longer pieces about Edgar Allan Poe. They are Addicted to Praise and Raven Noir. Overall, both are brilliant and should be developed into novel length pieces. Raven Noir is available for free by itself on the author’s Lulu page.

What I Saw That Day (also available by itself at Lulu) is a short story about the author’s point of view on 9/11 while he was working in New York. Obviously, it’s a very personal story that all of us can relate to. While reading it, I paused to remember where I was that day. The author does not cloud his story with vivid pictures of chaos and terror. Instead, he distances himself and the reader from it on purpose because those are visions we already know too well. “It was like opening the closet door when you’re thirty, and meeting the bogeyman,” he says. Great line! He was several miles away from where the towers were, but steps out to leave work and describes the heavy dust-laden air. His imagery of this is just as disturbing as watching the planes hit the towers on television over and over again back in 2001.

I wonder if my breath caught the World Trade Center and won’t let it go.

Other first person stories of dating, dreams, humor, joyrides in old cars, and dance lessons kept this reader turning the pages. Mr. Entrekin has also included two chapters from what he hopes will be his first novel.

Throughout my journey of Mr. Entrekin’s work, I often stopped and wanted to know more. This writer had pulled me in like a close friend telling me how his day went over a happy hour drink. I wanted to know why he chose to tell this story, or if that was how it really happened. Did he embellish on the page? Did he make this up entirely? Where did he get the idea for his Poe stories? If you read this, I think you will find yourself feeling the same way. The last part of the book is called After the Words, which reads like a sit down chat with the author. Here, he gives explanation for much of the work. He talks a bit about his own self-publishing journey. “There are no first, nor even seventh, drafts here,” he says. In reference to the popularity of online publishing and blogs, my favorite line of his is…

It is getting more difficult, then, to separate the wheat from the chaff. Google can sometimes help, but not always.

If you want to discover the kind of heart and soul that should be put into a POD book, then I highly recommend reading Entrekin today. As a writer or reader, you will not be disappointed.

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