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Michael Sonbert’s The Neverenders

September 1, 2010
Posted by OWCAdmin
Posted in Reviews-Fiction | 1 Comment »

Michael Sonbert’s <em>The Neverenders</em>

Perry fucking Patton: Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll personified. He’s the ultimate unreliable narrator, at time reminiscent of Will Christopher Baer’s Phineas Poe, but a little bit more destructive. He belongs in the dark, damp streets of the city where he has lead himself on a self-imposed, non-stop journey to self-desruction. And don’t we just love to watch something falling apart?

The story reeks of neo-noir. Yeah, it has flashes of early Palahniuk. And yeah, it’s a bit in the vein Catcher in the Rye. But nothing can be Transgressive or question identity these days without being early Palahniuk, and nothing can be coming-of-age without being Catcher.

The Neverenders is neither of the two.

Sonbert’s debut novel stands on its own two feet. The prose is sharp, cut-throat, and completely believable. Although, we probably shouldn’t believe a fucking word that dribbles out of Perry Patton’s vomit-breathed mouth, seeing as he is constantly drunk, high on coke and never sleeps. This combination leads to some extremely convincing sections in the prose where the reader can’t be sure if Perry has gone completely mad, or whether the crazy underworld he has found himself stumbling into has gone mad around him.

At times i speculated whether there was something more at play–almost something spiritual, or not spiritual, but maybe supernatural; something much darker than the real world can produce. But not in a tacky way. In a very noir kind of way. Whether this was intended or not is hard to tell. It may very well have been Sonbert’s way of showing the darker side of the psyche. Either way, it certainly allows one to contemplate and look into the story, feeling every single blow that Perry feels. Instead of just putting the book down and going “Well, that was good”, it makes you mull over it. Thinking about what was hinted at, but never told.

This is one of those one-night-stand books. Not, that it’s good for one night only, but that you become so engrossed in it that you’re done before you even scratch yourself. You’re sucked in and dragged back out before you know it, wondering what the fuck just happened to you.

The Neverenders is a blinding debut, and I can’t wait for Sonbert’s next release. I can only hope it has just as much rock ‘n’ roll injected in its raging veins–something that is severely missing from contemporary literature and music nowadays.

So, do a Big Shot thing and buy the damn book. Read more »

One for the Road, One for the Ditch: Two Novellas from Pulp Press

August 26, 2010
Posted by Nik Korpon
Posted in Reviews-Fiction | 1 Comment »

One for the Road, One for the Ditch: Two Novellas from Pulp Press

Reader beware: This ain’t your daddy’s crime. Start with strippers, blackjacks, combat boots and blood. Lots and lots of blood. Add in some double-crossing, a jigger of comeuppance and three fingers of revenge. Shake a couple times and drink it straight in a smoky room surrounded by cheats and cutthroats and cutthroat cheats. Welcome to Pulp Press. Blasting their way through the UK, the 100-page novellas from Pulp Press are lean and damn mean jewels. Not the kind that sparkle and garner Oh mys at reservation-only restaurants where waiters present bottle waters. These are the kind you stumble across in the gutter, the ones that slice you when you try to clean them.

Take My Bloody Alibi for example, penned by Dominic Milne. Our two lovely ladies, Cass and Marcella, are fresh out of Holloway prison and looking for revenge on the scum who put them in there. They concoct a personality—Sylvana—and take turns dressing up as her, then go about seducing their way into position to wreak said revenge. Sylvana winks her way into the crooked heart of PC Jack Thorne, the man who shares a dark past with Cass, and Sylvana stomps her way up the platform and slides down the pole at The Alley Cat Club. Our two ladies have every angle of their twisted path to justice covered. Except, of course, for the ones that they don’t.

It’s never that easy, is it?

The inevitable kinks sink their claws into our ladies and force them to use all their fishnetted wits to scratch, hack, punch and shoot their way to freedom. Did I mention that there’s a lot of blood? Just remember Cock Boomerang while reading this novella. Oh yeah. It’s that awesome. For me, it was even more fun to read because I studied at a university just a few blocks from Soho, where most of this novella takes place. I could remember the smell of the Fitzroy tavern while reading one Sylvana seduce PC Thorne, could feel the slippery grime that covered Berwick Street as the other Sylvana strutted what the good Lord gave her. Milne hit the mark perfectly when creating atmosphere, and, man, did it make me nostalgic.

On the flipside (sort of) we have Eloise Murphy, the combat-boot-wearing, Agnostic Front-blasting heroine of Danny Hogan’s Killer Tease. Eloise isn’t posing as a stripper to seek revenge (and she would break your face if you referred to it as stripping.) Rather, burlesque is her life, yet the baddies find her anyway. Named after the girl from The Damned song, Eloise is the old guard of burlesque. She appreciates custom made corsets, understands that the pleasure is in revealing and not just showing. She’s the type to name her cat Sinatra and find comfort in eight-inch stilettos. But, she is also the type of person we like to see get pushed down. She’s quick to strike out with a vulgar comeback or a set of knuckles at the slightest indiscretion. Granted, the indiscretions laid on her generally involve some kind of sedative which results in memory (and undergarment) loss. But still: you want to tell her to just chill out. So when, within the first few pages, Eloise gets booted from her burlesque gig and replaced by girls younger, richer and with more…moral flexibility, you could say… you can’t help but feel a bit I told you so. Now down on her luck, she seeks solace in a cold G&T and her cat.

Enter the aptly-named Napolean Hammerstein, who makes her an offer she can’t refuse. Suffice it to say, things get bad. Real bad. Pulp bad. And this middle section is when Hogan’s character really flourishes. Eloise has already presented herself in a certain light, but despite her brash and abrasive demeanor, the few quiet moments we see take the genre stereotypes and flip them on their head. When previously we were rooting for her fall, we’re now screaming for her to stand up and fight against her oppressors. Oh, and she does: ‘She was going to bring it to them, old school.’ And for her, old school involves a hatchet. Did I mention there’s a lot of blood? Probably, but I think I forgot about the bits of skull that she wipes from her boots onto an assailant’s doormat. In true pulp tradition, Hogan unleashes fury, ‘opening face like a bag of crisps,’ and includes one of the most horrifying scenes I’ve read in a long while involving Sinatra the cat. I still cringe when I see my own cats lying in a certain position. As in My Bloody Alibi, some perverted sense of justice is finally achieved, and it comes with a sidecar of inventive, excessive violence.

On a side note, Pulp Press has a very noble philosophy behind it. They understand that reality TV and the internet are, in many ways, changing the way we read and think. They acknowledge that people today have much shorter attention spans than they used to. But instead of railing against that like so many other ‘Literature’ columns, they use it to their advantage. They look for stories of a certain (shorter) length in order to entice people who normally don’t read to pick up a book. The awesome covers don’t hurt their case, either. Staying true to the roots of pulp and crime writing, when the dime novels and penny dreadfuls gave a more accurate representation of the collective experience than the ‘accepted’ novels, they are an outside entity who is generally overlooked and disregarded and quietly lighting fires that, hopefully, will consume the elitism that plagues a lot of literature. These writers are paying homage to those who ground out stories on Underwoods and simultaneously reinventing these tropes, showing that stories, like evil and violence and love, have no boundaries.

So: ‘Turn off your TV and discover fiction like it used to be…’

The Books

The Press

Review by Nik Korpon

Interview with Ryan W. Bradley: writer, family man, rockstar

August 23, 2010
Posted by Mel Bosworth
Posted in Interviews/MiniViews | 4 Comments »

Interview with Ryan W. Bradley: writer, family man, rockstar

MB: Who is Ryan Bradley?

RB: Ryan Bradley is a figure skater. He is also a failed pitcher who spent years (and possible still toils) in the New York Yankee farm system. However, I imagine you’re actually speaking about the Ryan Bradley that is me. Above all things the Ryan Bradley that is me, who often pretentiously puts a W in his name, is a father and a husband. A guy who works really hard at crappy jobs and also at this thing we call writing.

MB: Let’s talk about this thing we call writing, Ryan W. Bradley the non-figure skater, although if figure skating were part of your repertoire that would be rad and I might demand pictures. I still might demand pictures of you working really hard at crappy jobs because that’s even harder than figure skating and speaks volumes about character. Are you a character, Ryan W. Bradley? And why writing? Goddamn. What is it exactly about this thing we call writing? Why, Ryan W. Bradley? Tell me why!

RB: I can certainly pull off at least a photo of me working at one or two crappy jobs. Me in figure skating outfits is something I’m not about to reveal, even fictitiously. I don’t know that I’m a character. That’s the kind of thing I feel Humphrey Bogart might accuse some bit player of in a old school crime drama, and I’d much rather be Bogart.

As for your more pertinent question: many writers, of much higher intelligence than myself have tried to explain the compulsion to write. And it is a compulsion. But beyond that I can’t explain why. I can, however, explain how. I came to writing through injury. I always loved reading, but hated writing. I was more into sports. And acting. But when I suffered a severe back injury in high school I found myself in a lot of physical pain without any of the outlets I normally took advantage of. That is when I began writing. I was lucky to recover from the injury, but my addled brain has yet to recover from the writing compulsion I developed.

MB: Do you subscribe to the notion that we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be? And that everything that happens in our lives happens for a reason? If you were never injured in high school where do you think you’d be now? Do you think you’d have found your way to writing through other, perhaps less painful, events, seen or unforeseen? And if so, would the association be different? Where would the writing inspiration squirt out, if not from between your vertebrae? Do you ever find yourself feeling grateful for the bad things that have happened to you in the past? And if so, doesn’t it feel goddamn good to be so wise and mature?

RB: Honestly the easiest thing in the world is to feel bad for one’s self, especially in the face of bad or hard times. And it’s not that I’m past that, by any means, but I’m getting better. I was told my whole life that things happen for a reason and it always seemed like such a crock. When I met and fell in love with my wife I realized all the crap my mom had always told me was true, and I’ve got to tell you it pissed me off a bit.

As for whether or not I’d be a writer without all those things I’m not sure. I think I would have been doing something creative, there are so many creative outlets that I love, I know I would have been doing something, but I kind of doubt that I was destined to be a writer. Maybe that’s me being ignorant once again.

But, yes, I am very grateful for all the stupid and horrible shit I’ve gone through in life, not necessarily because of the writing, but certainly because of my wife and sons, which I know only came about because of everything I’d gone through in life. Read more »

Thomas M. Sullivan’s Life In The Slow Lane: Surviving A Tour Of Duty In Drivers Education

August 14, 2010
Posted by victor
Posted in Reviews-Non-fiction | Comments Off

Thomas M. Sullivan’s <em>Life In The Slow Lane: Surviving A Tour Of Duty In Drivers Education</em>

Life in the Slow Lane is about a life as journey of discovery, in this instance teaching wealthy kids how to drive. So it`s a journey in a car, which is often how North Americans learn about life. This book is rooted in reality.

Caught on the horns of an unemployment dilemma, Thomas L. Sullivan took a short term job as a driving instructor to pay the bills. He starts out arrogant: better than his students, his employer, pretty much the world. He has a lot to learn, and does.

Life as a driving instructor ain`t a drive through the country. The company Sullivan signs up with has ancient cars and even more ancient driving routes. Sullivan is given maps for rural routes that turn out to be beyond dated—where a country store should be, there is a mall.

Equally problematic with poor equipment is abusive planning. Lessons can be half an hour or longer. They are tightly scheduled. Periodically instructors must drive clear across town at rush hour to make the next appointment. If they instructors are lucky, more or less, the appointment shows up. If the kid doesn`t show up, the instructor receives only a minimal fee.

And the kids? Sullivan spends a lot of pages about them and their parents. The school instruction he provides is essentially to high school students in a wealthy area. The mothers (he did not seem to deal much with fathers) engage in a friendly competition with each other as to how is more ‘booked’. Between preparing for final exams, soccer games, piano lessons and the rest, driving lessons are one more item to squeeze in. Some of the children seem aware, while virtually all the parents appear, well, driven.

Sullivan’s story is told with growing awareness. His tone towards people gradually softens as he realizes some of his own shortcomings.

Oh, and you will learn a great deal when reading this book about how to drive properly. Read more »

Cigar Ring Poetry

August 13, 2010
Posted by Caleb J Ross
Posted in Lit(erature) | 2 Comments »

Cigar Ring Poetry