Book Review: Alabama Noir, edited by Don Noble

Alabama Noir

Edited by Don Noble

Publisher: Akashic Books

Date of Publication: April 7, 2020

Pages: 256 

This anthology is part of the Akashic Noir Series which began in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. There are now over 100 books in this series from locations around the world and featuring many “name” authors as editors.  Each edition features writers from the area represented which lends great authenticity to the stories.  Alabama Noir is one of the latest books released and is edited by Emmy Award winning screenwriter Don Noble.

I was immediately impressed with the roster of authors included in this volume, mainly because of the diversity within it.  Out of the sixteen stories, five were penned by women and four by people of color.  Some of my favorite fiction writers are here as well, including Ace Atkins, Tom Franklin and Winston Groom.  In fact, I purchased this book because of a social media post by Atkins promoting his story “Sweet Baby”. 

In the Introduction Noble notes that Alabama of the 1960s was dominated by race issues and the civil rights movement.  He notes that unfortunately race problems still exist and points to the inadequacies in the justice system and in the state’s prisons.  There is movement towards coming to grips with the past and trying to move past this history as evidenced by the work of attorney and social justice advocate Bryan Stevenson and the establishment of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery.

Noble also gives a brief description of the Noir genre, using The Maltese Falcon as the gold standard example.  The three dominant themes of the genre include failed romance and femme fatales, greed and revenge, each with varying amounts of violence mixed in.  This anthology contains excellent examples of all three, with the added dimensions of racial discord and social inequality mixed in.

I enjoyed all of the stories, but I did have a few favorites.  The first was “Deep Water, Dark Horizons” by Suzanne Hudson, a native of Georgia but a longtime resident Mobile and Fairhope.  The story is set in Fish River.  An elderly landowner and a tenant (who are friends) argue over a broken septic system when the tenant rekindles an old flame on the internet.  The landowner is described:

                “It was his mind-set, to be wary.  The older he got, the less he trusted folks, even old friends. He had just about stripped away anyone who ever mattered to him, stripped away with suspicion, always, of ulterior motives.”

Another favorite was “What Brings You Back Home” by Michelle Richmond who was raised in Mobile.  In this story a mom and widow whose child and husband were killed in a mass shooting who seeks and takes revenge on a Senator who voted against gun control.  Another example of a superb story is “The Junction Boys” by D. Winston Brown an author from Ensley, Alabama who now lives in Birmingham.  Here a young veteran returns home to confront his first girlfriend’s father who sexually abused her.  The character’s state of mind is described:

                “The information at first swirled around Colesbery’s head, then he felt that twitch in his stomach that always came before a mission.  The plan materialized in his brain – how he would do it, when he would do it, where he would do it.  He rubbed his eyes and then stretched his fingers wide, balled them tight, stretched them again, and settled back in the moment.”

                This is a magnificent collection of short stories.  You don’t have to be a noir fan to appreciate the great writing and captivating characters.  Even the more violent stories are not graphic.  I was thoroughly entertained from start to finish.  I am encouraged to purchase more of the books in the Akashic Noir series.

Book Review: After the Plague by T.C. Boyle

After the Plague

Author: T. C. Boyle

Publisher: Viking Adult

Date of Publication: September 2, 2001

Pages: 256 (Hardcover)

     This eclectic collection of short stories is about as good as it gets.  There are sixteen collected tales here which range from poignant to sublime.  Each story is packed with eccentric characters in difficult and often very odd situations.  There are normal people thrust out of their comfort zones,  older folks not coping with loneliness and depression and young lovers failing to accept or even realize the consequences of their actions.

     Stories are told from unique points of view, some from minor characters and even one narrated by a deceased spouse!  What is the constant in these stories is the superb writing: word craft of the highest order.  The opening sentences grab the reader and thrust you smack into the middle of the tale.  Consider this opening sentence from "Friendly Skies":

     "When the engine under the right wing began to unravel a thin skein of greasy, dark smoke, Ellen peered out the abraded Plexiglas window and saw the tufted clouds rising up and away from her and knew she was going to die."

     Even though this collection is a bit dated (published almost twenty years ago) the author has showcased timeless issues: anger management, sexism, ageism, class status and struggles with unmet expectations in relationships.  The star of this collection, though, is the writing which is timeless.  I highly recommend this collection and anything else written by this superb author.

Book Review: Florida by Lauren Groff

Florida

Author: Lauren Groff

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Date of Publication: June 5, 2018

Pages: 288 (Hardcover Edition)

    This is the second collection of short stories for this author (she published Delicate Edible Birds in 2009).  She also has published three novels.  This outstanding collection was published in 2018 and won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, Kirkus Prized and Southern Book Prize.  The author now lives in Gainesville and Florida paints a vivid and somewhat unflattering picture of her home state.  This is a "warts and all" view of the Sunshine State.

     There are eleven gripping stories here, all dealing with aspects of contemporary life.  There are treatments of homelessness, caring for aging parents, strained marriages, work-life imbalance and single parenting.  There is also an undercurrent in several stories of overpopulation and encroachment of development on natural territories   All of the stories are told with an economy of words but with striking description.

In Ghosts and Empties a young mother walks nightly in her new neighborhood after putting her children to bed:  "On my nighttime walks, the neighbors' lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums."

In "Flower Hunters" a woman on vacation in a remote cabin with two small children (while her husband is at home working) endures a violent summer storm: "The rain knocks at the metal roof, and she imagines it licking away at the limestone under her house, the way her children lick away at Everlasting Gobstoppers, which they are not allowed, but which she still somehow finds in sticky rainbow pools in their sock drawers."

In "Yport" the author describes the climate in her home state: "Florida in the summer is a slow hot drowning."  Later, the main character who is doing research on a book about Guy de Maupassant describes the town of Yport, France : "Look!  she tells them, gesturing up the harbor at a little cluster of nineteenth-century houses on the other side of the channel, which huddle together, distrustful of the twenty-first century industry around them."

   In summary, this is an outstanding collection of stories, exquisitely written with evocative descriptions.  Florida features many contemporary social issues woven into the fabric of entertaining and gripping stories.

Book Review: Had A Good Time by Robert Olen Butler

Had a Good Time

Author: Robert Olen Butler

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Date of Publication: August 9, 2005

Pages: 288 (Trade Paper Edition) 

     This is another stellar set of stories from a terrific writer.  Robert Olen Butler won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.  Had a Good Time is another intriguing book of expertly crafted short stories, each with a very interesting starting point.  The author collects vintage, turn of the century post cards.  He uses the photo and greeting from a different card from his collection as a jumping off point for each story.  This is reminiscent of his collection Tabloid Dreams, in which he used a bizarre but actual headline from a supermarket tabloid as a starting point for each story. 

    In each story the author recreates a vignette of early 1900s America, from small towns in the South to remote farms in desolate South Dakota.  Each story is a carefully constructed character study with many poignant as well as humorous moments.  My personal favorite is “The Ironworker’s Hayride” where a very shy young bachelor is convinced to go on a blind date with a girl who has a wooden leg.  The ensuing hayride and this man’s internal debate with his conscience are hilarious.  This one story alone is worth the purchase price of the book.

     While the author describes scenes with realism and creates memorable characters, the best parts of these stories are the dialogues.  Several of the stories, set in the South with children as main characters, evoke memories of verbal exchanges in Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.  In others, the plots move along solely through dialogue.  In others, the spoken words set tone and create atmosphere. 

     Robert Olen Butler teaches creative writing at Florida State University.  If you are interested in how a truly masterful writer creates a short story, visit his web-site “Inside CreativeWriting”.   He has a day by day posting of his work on a story, from inception to completion, including edits and revisions.

     This is a very entertaining collection.  The stories themselves are very interesting, but the thought processes behind each one are even more so.  Had a Good Time by Robert Olen Butler is available in hard back from Grove Press.

Book Review: The Museum of Dr. Moses by Joyce Carol Oates

The Museum of Dr. Moses

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Date of Publication: August 4, 2008

Pages: 240 (Trade Paperback Edition)

     The Museum of Dr. Moses is a collection of ten stories written by Joyce Carol Oates over a number of years and published in various literary and mystery magazines.  They all are very eloquent pieces of writing with superb descriptions and character developments, even within the confines of the genre (short fiction).  Each story contains a macabre character (or two) who carom through the lives of more or less sane folks around them.   I read this book while vacationing at the Outer Banks during the week of Halloween.  The beach was deserted and the northern beaches were dark and quiet.  This was the perfect book to read that week!

     Many of the stories channel the energy and madness of Edgar Allan Poe.  Valentine, July Heat Wave resonates with the horror of The Telltale Heart.  The final story in the collection, The Museum of Dr. Moses is as horrific as any penned by Poe.  There are several stories which study serial killers and their psyche, including Dr. Moses, Hi, Howya' Doin'? and Bad Habits.  

     The author does a masterful job of examining the effects these depraved characters have on their families, co-workers and even innocent strangers.  The best example of this is in Suicide Watch, where a father confronts his imprisoned son who may or may not have killed his own son.  Meeting with his son in a court-mandated psychiatric hospital, the father realizes what his son is capable of:  "There was something wrong with the son's eyes, set deep in their sockets, bloodshot, with a peculiar smudged glare like worn-out Plexiglass."  Another story which hones in on this ripple effect is The Man Who Fought Roland Le Strange.  In this story a boxer loses his big fight which leads to a downward spiral in his personal life.  His best friend sorts through the wreckage of both of their lives. 

     This is a strong collection of stories for which the reader needs to be in the right frame of mind.  Like Poe, Joyce Carol Oates shocks the reader by presenting characters who appear fairly normal on the surface but have a macabre inner core which most never see.  In particular, it's hard to forget Dr. Moses.

Book Review: Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Author: Karen Russell

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Date of Publication: February 12, 2013

Pages: 256

      Vampires in the Lemon Grove is an eclectic eight story collection from Karen Russell, author of one previous critically acclaimed collection (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves) and one novel, Swamplandia (neither of which have I read).  These stories were all previously published in literary journals such as “Granta” and “Tin House.”  All eight stories are tremendously creative and inventive.  Sparkling prose is present throughout the entire volume.  I’m not a great fan of fantasy or science fiction (these stories aren’t really either, but there’s probably not a niche for them to be classified in).   However, even if I didn’t particularly care for one of the stories, there were at least several sentences in each which were so wonderful that they made reading the story very worthwhile.
 
     Vampires in the Lemon Grove  is a beautifully told strange tale of an old vampire who has lost his ability to morph into a bat.  He has a human-like relationship with another vampire until he comes out of "retirement".  This is a lyrical story which I guess stands as an allegory for long term love relationships.  A noteworthy snippet:  

"Often I wonder to what extent a mortal's love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I'll never quite understand.  And lately I've been having a terrible thought: Our love affair will end before the world does."  

     Reeling for the Empire is one I didn’t really care for.  It is a futuristic description of Japanese girls taken from their families and fed a moth which essentially turns the girls into silkworms.  I suppose this is a statement of sorts regarding slavery or indentured servitude.  Also, the main character (one of the enslaved girls) regrets her decision to volunteer for this service, making this a story of second guessing life's choices.  Again there are pearls of prose to be savored:   

"Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.  It's become my sanctuary..."

"O even the nausea of regret can be converted to use."

      The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979 reminded me just a little bit of Poe’s The Raven in that a seagull plays a prominent symbolic role much like Poe’s bird.  Russell’s gull is able to bring objects from the future into a nest which the main character uses to shape his actions.  This character at first sees the gull which follows him as his conscience, then as an omen.  Proving Up tells the story of homesteaders in the late 1800s sharing a glass window which is a requirement for transfer of ownership of the land from the government at the time of inspection.  It is one of the longer stories in the collection and seems to change focus from a story of grim pioneer determination to one of survival.  Several great sentences from this story:

"In summer, this room can get as hot as the held breath of the world."

 "My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her."


     The Barn at the End of Our Term was my favorite of the eight stories because of its audacious premise and because it made me laugh.  It is a very imaginative story where half of the horses in a barn are re-incarnated former United States presidents.  They range from Rutherford B. Hayes to Dwight Eisenhower.  One day James Garfield escapes.  Hayes tries to identify his wife Lucy ("The first first lady") in all of the other animals at the farm and he becomes quite enamored with a duck.  A quote from this story:

"The presidents spend a lot of time talking about where the other citizens of the Union might have ended up.  Wilson thinks the suffragettes probably came back as kicky rabbits."

     Dougbert Shackleton's Rules for Antarctic Tailgating is an extremely odd account of "The Food Chain Games" and the dos and don'ts of tailgating in the Antarctic.  This one made me think of The Hunger Games in its imaginative scope, although the thrust of the story is different.  A few gems from this story:

"Antarctic tailgaters know exactly how hard it is to party." 

"If you're a health nut, don't tailgate in the antarctic.  You can always put balsamic vinaigrette on salted meat and sort of pretend it's a salad."

     The New Veterans was another favorite.  The main character is a middle-aged female massage therapist.  She becomes part of a program which treats young Iraqi war veterans.  Her first patient has a huge tattoo on his back depicting a Humvee attack which killed a comrade in arms.  The massage therapist confronts her own survivor guilt issues (her mother died young of cancer) as she helps relieve the soldier's. 

"In truth, Beverly can never quite adjust to her age on the calendar;  most days, she still feels like an old child."

     The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis is a funky take on bullying and its effects on the perpetrators as well as the victims.  It takes a supernatural-Stephen King like twist of plot early on from which it never escapes.  Sparkling writing again is on display here:

"The central acres of Friendship Park were filled with pines and spruce and squirrels that chittered some charming bullshit at you, up on their hind legs begging for a handout.  They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed, innocent look and trheadbare fur of child junies.  Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets tu buy train tickts to the national park an hour north of Anthem's depressed downtown."

"As the son, I got to be on a first-name basis with allo these adult men, all her boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way."

     All in all, this was a very entertaining (albeit somewhat fanciful and at times bizarre) collection.  It is well worth reading if only just to immerse yourself in splendid writing.  I own a copy of Swamplandia, so it may need to be elevated in the “to read” list.

Bood Reveiw: Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders

Tenth of December: Stories

Author: George Saunders

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Date of Publication: January 8, 2013

Pages: 159 (NOOK Edition)

   This eclectic collection of nine short stories was heralded upon its publication in January, 2013 as one of the best books of the year.  It is an interesting set of stories, all dealing with contemporary issues.  The opening story "Victory Lap" is the story of a teen abduction told from three different perspectives: the victim, the perpetrator and an autistic neighbor.  There are stories of families with children facing various challenges, out of work middle class Americans and a noteworthy Iraqi war vet dealing with his dysfunctional family upon his return from active duty ("Home").

     The author uses various different writing styles in these stories. Some are told as an internal stream of consciousness ("Victory Lap" and "Al Roosten").  One story takes the form of a letter to employees trying to improve morale and maintain positive attitudes ("Exhortation").  Another is in diary format as a father explains why he cannot adequately provide for his family ("The Semplica Girl Diaries").

     There's an odd science fiction story ("Escape from Spiderhead") which is reminiscent of Anthony Burgess' A clockwork Orange in which Saunders creates an indictment of science and the scientific method.  My favorite line from any of the stories is the conclusion to a self-deprecating rant by the main character in "Al Roosten."  It is in regards to his wife who "  "...cheated on him with Charles, which had fried his ass possibly worse than any single other ass frying he'd ever had, in a life that, it recently seemed, was simply a series of escalating ass fries."

     This is a very entertaining and thought provoking set of stories regarding contemporary American life.  I liked the varying points of view but was put off by some of the seemingly endless stream of consciousness
style.  One of the best books of the year?  Maybe, but the year's not over.