WILLCALL FOR THEATER, FILM AND BOOKS
Books
The
Critics Praise
The Red Album of Asbury Park Remixed
By
Alex
Austin
"It is simply anamazing work of fiction,
a book you won't be able to put down."-John Pfeiffer, Aquarian Magazine
"An affecting and honest work that rolls out like a pop song and resonates
unforgettably, the way a great chorus should."-Alex Green,
Caught in the Carousel Magazine
"Strongly evocative of a time and place, of interest especially to those who hail from the "swamps of Jersey" but also to anyone who loves rock 'n' roll. Good book!"-Dave Williams, Journalist, former Books Editor, Asbury Park Press
"The writing is just brilliantly graphic,"-Jay Benedict, Vulpes Libris
Available in paperback at barnes
andnoble.com and amazon.com
Now available as a FREE
PODCAST on Podiobooks.com
Book Reviews
Songs of Vagabonds, Misfits and Sinners
New York Stories
Bully Press
By Ken Wohlrob
Although things start out bad for Ken Wohlrob's characters, they will soon endure worse. In his aptly named new collection of stories, Songs of Vagabonds, Misfits and Sinners, Wohlrob presents a cast of New York denizens trapped by self-delusion, drug addiction, dehumanizing jobs, self-destructive ambitions, familial loyalty, old school entropy, smothering debt and always reliable fate, whose only reward for this shit blizzard called life is a moment or two of stunning bewildering truth. In the first story in the collection, "Non Ho Tutto Il Giorno" (I Do Not Have All Day), old Tony leans on a cane "covered in cat scratches" as he seeks out Tums to quiet a stomach that always gets upset when he's nervous about something-and he's nervous. After long consideration, Tony is making his move from the Brooklyn apartment where he has lived (and not lived) forever. Occupying Tony during his preparations are memories of his squalid and dead-end existence, fragmented speculations on the changes in his vanishing Italian neighborhood and leaden thoughts of his mother and his neighbors. But something doesn't want Tony leaving, maybe Saint Anthony. In "The Look" a mother struggles to raise her daughter while counting on the child's junkie father to stay straight long enough to take care of the child while she makes a living as a stripper. Under the weight of her dehumanizing job and fear for her daughter, her only escape is her imagination. Wohlrob renders her experience heartbreaking, surreal and incandescent. This is Nathanial West territory, where pity is never quite an adequate response. My favorite story in the collection is "Claimus" (in pronunciation, think Camus), a universally misunderstood artist on a paranoid adventure. Claimus is a hybrid of Falstaff and Fitzgerald's Pat Tilly. A funny, clever tale by a writer who knows his territory.—Alex Austin
Songs of Vagabonds, Misfits and Sinners available online at Amazon.com
Tender Graces
By Kathryn Magendie
Two weeks before her mother’s death, Virginia Kate Carey received a letter from that troubled woman. A previous attempt at reconciliation on Virginia’s part had elicited not much more than meanness and disregard. On her previous visit, Virginia sought insight into the inexplicable actions of her mother toward her and her brothers while they were growing up. Her mother, Katie, offered not a scrap of help, much less any sign of the love that Virginia desperately needs, but won’t ask for openly. No...moreTwo weeks before her mother’s death, Virginia Kate Carey received a letter from that troubled woman. A previous attempt at reconciliation on Virginia’s part had elicited not much more than meanness and disregard. On her previous visit, Virginia sought insight into the inexplicable actions of her mother toward her and her brothers while they were growing up. Her mother, Katie, offered not a scrap of help, much less any sign of the love that Virginia desperately needs, but won’t ask for openly. Not without her own stubbornness, Virginia resisted returning to her mother’s deathbed, but now as Tender Graces opens, Virginia goes back to her Appalachian home, the Hollow, seeking in memories and ghosts the meaning of the events in her life. In this finely wrought exploration of character and family relationships, Kathryn Magendie weaves a riveting story, filled with rich dialogue, regional expressions (many of which were unfamiliar to this New Jersey-born reader, but I was charmed all the same), and pop culture references of the 60s and 70s that will make you smile. There are some terrific scenes, one that involves girls, boys and snakes is as good a piece of writing as you’ll find in contemporary literature. The book is funny, poignant and rich with insight into the human heart—Alex Austin.
Tender Graces is available online at amazon.com
The American Book of the Dead
By Henry Baum
Many writers have sailed off on the premise of a writer writing a book which turns out to be the book written—the one that you’re holding in your hands (in this case, The American Book of the Dead). Fiction’s shores are littered with these wrecks of self-indulgence. Henry Baum, who nests more than a few matryoshka dolls inside the concept, pulls it off mostly, in this meticulously plotted, and fairly demanding, book.
The setting is America 2008 and America 2020, and narrator Eugene Myers is writing a novel. Myers explains he is a young man with a new family and also a middle-aged man of fifty, a teacher, waiting out the Apocalypse. The book is rooted in 9/11, when Myers was trying to write another novel and had just broken up with his girlfriend. The events of 9/11 changed the course of his life. He married the girlfriend, had a kid and moved into the future haunted by the images of 9/11.
The images provide him with an idea for a new novel: “A writer uncovers the secrets of a UFO conspiracy, secret societies, life after death, all of which lead to WW III, spearheaded by a fundamentalist Christian president. In short, everything that eventually happens.”
The young Myers knows all this happened because the older Myers is helping him write his story, providing “Cliffs notes from the future,” one of the notes revealing , for example, that World War III happened.
Things start (or "started," these multiple temporal POVs put a strain on tense) deteriorating in Myers's America when a pornographic sitcom called “Stick It to Me” attracts a national audience and sets in motion a tidal wave of violence and sex. It also results in a personal dilemma for Myers when he discovers his daughter doing porno online. Confronted with her actions, the daughter shamelessly defends herself. Hey, everybody’s doing it. The prevalence of this attitude across American society produces a conservative backlash that gets Charles Winchell, a Christian fundamentalist, elected president.
Myers weaves his efforts to get his daughter out of porn with the changes on the national stage, and then ups the ante when he suffers a head injury that gives him the power to connect with other people who will figure in the coming Apocalypse. Myers, of course, will play a crucial role in the gathering events.
Although the story occasionally brings to mind Philip K. Dick. The American Book of the Dead is more akin to the satire of Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps even the work of Vonnegut’s creation Kilgore Trout, a fictional writer based on science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. Vonnegut employed science fiction conceits to shread 20th Century America's free market values. Baum aims at the extended Bush era and the excesses of our media-driven culture.
For satire to be totally effective, there have to a few harrowing moments that overwhelm the humor and remind the reader of the story’s point. As the book nears its end, the humor broadens, and Baum, faced with resolving his complications, doesn’t quite get to those moments. There’s a hell of a death count, but Dresden is never bombed.
That said, Baum's American Dead is a valuable corrective.
Last Exit In New Jersey
By C.E. Grundler
Growing up on New Jersey's Raritan Bay, I fell in love with boats. Sailboats, rowboats, cabin cruisers-it didn't matter. Boats represented freedom, adventure and mystery, access to all those Jersey waterways that I could only explore on a map. Sadly, I never had a boat, unless a halved propane tank or a raft of leashed driftwood counted. By the time I could have acquired a boat, my passions had been redirected to cars (boats with wheels) and girls. C.E. Grundler's novel Last Exit in New Jersey is probably the closest I'm going to come to my dream of boating adventure on the creeks, bays, rivers, harbors, marinas and seas of my home state-although I never envisioned that number of dead bodies showing up. A mystery in the John D. MacDonald tradition (Travis McGee is referenced many times in the story) both in its largely watery setting and tone, the novel also brings to mind Dashiell Hammet in the complexity of its plot, and even Stieg Larsson in its use of a strong young woman with an attitude as a main character.
Twenty-year-old Hazel Moran was raised on boats, and when she wasn't sailing
she was accompanying her father in his big-rig. Hazel knows Jersey, as will
the reader by the book's conclusion. We meet Hazel aboard the small schooner
Witch 23 nautical miles southeast of Cape May (specifically 38°39'51.72"N
74°34'27.40"W. Grundler keeps us well posted on locations) as she's
getting rid of a dead body. From this point, the story will flash back and
flash forward at a dizzying pace. Grundler introduces us to a Wagnerian cast
of characters, whose motives, actions, loyalties and even identities are always
in doubt. Of particular interest is Hammon, whose delusions include a companion
called Annabel, who calls the shots in more ways than one. The chapters alternate
from Hazel's to Hammon's perspective, an interesting strategy that has a big
payoff. Thrust into the role of detective, Hazel will spend 10 days digging
into the past, every discovery dragging her deeper into murder and mayhem.
Last Exit In New Jersey is well-paced, densely-plotted story that mystery-thriller
fans will enjoy immensely.
Black Air
By Clark McCann
In his riveting debut novel Black Air, Clark McCann deftly creates a main character who is equal parts Cormac McCarthy’s John Grady Cole and Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne. Son of a sadistic Montana cowboy, Tom Shepard faced down a shotgun in his drunken father’s hands at the impressionable age of thirteen, and from that moment not much could scare boy or man.
We meet Tom wasting away in a Mexican jail, awaiting transfer to a state prison and then a trial on charges of rape and murder, for which there’s ample evidence. Few of God’s creatures enjoy the close comfort of a south-of-the-border jail cell, and for Tom such confinement runs a close second to the rack and thumbscrews. An enthusiast of the sport that got Icarus in trouble, Tom is a paraglider. Flying thermals at 1,500 feet per minute, up there with the hawks and clouds, is where he longs to be.
The view out his cell window, which offers a patch of that desired sky, also evokes some bad memories. In a flashback to his tour as a Marine lance corporal in Afghanistan, we’re taken to a perilous mountain firefight, where Tom courageously does the right thing for his comrades, and is subsequently thrown into a military prison for disobeying a superior's orders, which eventually gets Tom tossed out of the corps as “psychologically unfit.”
It’s a given that the Mexican jail isn’t going to hold Tom, but before McCann sets those wheels in motion, he takes us back a few days to the World Paragliding Championships, which drew Tom to Valle de Bravo, Mexico, and his fate. Serving as a primer for the sport, the scenes introduce us to several of the key characters in the novel, including Tom’s guide, Felix Carrasco, a hard-drinking, Baudelaire-quoting local, Greta, an old flame in constant heat, and Greta’s boyfriend, Jaime Lujan, who is Tom’s main rival in the competition. Jaime is a first-class prick, but it’s Jaime’s brother Angel who carries off the trophy for worst bastard in show. A sadistic drug dealer who embodies the brutal outlaws who make contemporary Mexico a land of mayhem and fear, Angel will be at the center of some of the most gruesome and gripping scenes in the novel. He’s a bad guy for our times.
Once sprung from the local jail, Tom will be the hunter and the hunted on a journey that takes us deep into a harrowing Mexican culture, beset with blood and violence. Black Air offers a resilient, engaging protagonist, a first-class villain, action at all altitudes, smart humor, finely-tuned suspense and sex sufficient unto the day.
A remarkably realized first novel--Alex Austin.
Black Air is available online at Amazon.com
Tender Graces
By Kathryn Magendie
