With Spider Face Kevin Rabas confirms his much deserved position as an acute observer of life’s quiet moments. What he began with his poetry collections, Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano and Bird’s Horn before it, Rabas continues with Spider Face, his first story collection and here’s hoping not his last. Where his poetry explores those quiet moments of life in rhythmic bursts, using stanzas and imagery as vessels for emotion, his stories introduce characters as those vessels, adding a strong sense of human connection to his writing repertoire.
The story, “The Battle,” opens the collection with the image of two young lovers and a broken bottle, which serves not only the vignette itself but also what feels like the impetus to the entire collection. Though it’s dangerous to assume an author’s fiction is autobiographical, Spider Face reads like a diary full of snapshots, and this opening story has all the gravity of a real life nucleus around which the entire collection revolves.
Perhaps the quote from the story “Solid Aluminum” best exemplifies how these stories may have originated:
“You gotta keep your eyes open for this kinda stuff that nobody wants, kid, and pick it up. It’ll come in handy someday, all this junk. That’s what I bought your Mom’s ring with this past year, for her anniversary, with all the cash I had saved up from haulin’ in six years worth of junk. Kept the bills bundled up in an envelope, tax-free, with a rubber band tied round it, bundled under the workbench.” (pg 18)
Spider Face feels like an accumulation of moments, a peak into the author’s life made tangible by a poet’s rhythm and an artist’s eye. Buy it. You’ll live the life of an artist for the evening.
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