Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Book Review: Awry: Stories duncan b. barlow

 


Awry by duncan b. barlow

212 pages, Paperback
Published April, 2025 by Bridge Eight Press
 

Reviewing fiction from duncan b. barlow always presents me with a challenge of where to start. I met him for the first time 35 years ago. Give or take a year, but my math should be correct. The first time I consumed the art of this creator it was music. It was an Elk’s lodge or VFW hall in Indiana, without a stage, and his band his Louisville-based hardcore band Endpoint, was playing. Duncan was the guitar player who went crazy while they ripped through their set. I went home with the vinyl of their new (at the time) record ‘In a Time of Hate.’

It was Duncan who sold me the record, still sitting on a shelf here in this office. A year and a half later, I wanted to book an Endpoint show, and I was given Duncan’s phone number. It was 1992, and when we got on the phone, somehow the topic of horror fiction came up. I had already had the dream of becoming a writer, and Duncan was the first person I met who wanted to be a writer too.

We were both into hardcore music, writing, etc. We were both learning disabled. We shared passions and had similar educational struggles.  Duncan’s success with multiple bands was always an inspiration. Many years after that, our first books just happened to have the same publisher.  I was greatly inspired by Duncan’s weird, dark prose that flirted with genre in the same way that a Brian Evenson or Margaret Atwood story does.  It is a collection that touches on genre, but it is not held back by the ghettoized distinction of pulp fiction. 

It could be Duncan’s position as teacher, a writer with his foot in academia, but more than realistically, it is the skill, the precision. It is also a story-first method that doesn’t worry about genre in the first place. (Those of us know most writers feel that way when they sit down to write)

Awry is filled with short stories whose connective tissue is careful, deliberate choice of words. There are dark stories, ones I would consider horror, some are experimental, and some just emotional. My three favorites are more in the horror vein, but that is not a shock. Those three stories are worth getting the entire book for. There was something that I enjoyed in each story but the stand-outs for me were special. 

My favorite stories are Of Flesh and Fur, The Fine Set of Teeth, and The Father’s Work.

On Flesh and Fur was once published as a standalone novella. This is a darkly surreal tale that builds off a strange desire to reproduce…

“My desire to have a child began when I was organizing my basement. Transferring musty things from weary cardboard boxes to sleek plastic containers. It was a thing of beauty. All clear and labeled.”

Of Flesh and Fur stands out as a weird tale; it drips with surreal and at times creepy vibes.

“I lay in bed that night, and it prodded me. A bird pecking in my chest. Let me out. When I fell to sleep, I dreamed of a brown river faded by a vast white ocean. Floated there, the current leading me to land. A surge of water crested the tree line, and when I passed the conflux, the wave towered behind me. Collapsed onto me, and in the tumble, I heard a solitary word. Baby.”

A powerful tale, I can see why Duncan chose it to publish it as a stand-alone, and it might be the best in the collection, but it is not my personal favorite.

My favorite is Fine Set of Teeth, which worked to get my skin crawling. The way the story unfolded made me laugh and uncomfortable at the same time. It feels like something spun out of the hilarious opening paragraph. I found the story evoked major feelings. 

“The tooth's origins were unknown to him, but when he’d woken, disoriented from the dream he could not remember and went to the kitchen for a glass of water, Gavin found the tooth resting on the table. The tooth was spotless save for the thin string of saliva, which ran between the crown and the tabletop Gavin scratched his left temple. The remaining strands of hair caught on his freshly chewed fingernails. The tooth had to belong to someone.”

But the story that evoked the strongest feelings for me was the Cormac McCarthy-like The Father’s work. The southern gothic weirdness of this story again gave me the correct creeps.

“The nurses at the hospital asked Boone a litany of questions, and he responded with the following answers a few minutes ago, trapped under a tractor, hatchet, and finally, just plain bad luck. They wheeled Cade into surgery, and a nurse escorted Boone to a room with an empty bed, where he remained until Cade returned from surgery, not to tend crops, the pig, or shower.

On the second day in the hospital Cade was more present so Boone said do you know why I done it.

The boy nodded.” 

There is no writer I compare Duncan to instantly but those looking for slightly off-beat stories look no further. His novels are equally hard to pin down. You could accuse me of bias, but if I didn’t like it I would be silent. I love this work and think he reflects the writer I know. That is a great thing about writers from outcast tribes. The stories are in any way punk rock, but that outsider vibe drips off the pages. Awry is a powerful work.

Sunday, July 20, 2025

Book Review: Extremity by Nicholas Binge

 


Extremity by Nicholas Binge

176 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication: September 16, 2025 by Tordotcom

 

I should state right off the bat that I root for every book I open to read. Binge had a huge hit on his hands with Ascension. He got a blurb from Stephen King, and he is translated into nine languages. Frankly, he has more success than me, so keep that in mind. He has incredible ideas, and I understand the appeal.  The thing is that I was challenged by Ascension. I loved the concept, but didn’t jive with the execution. The narrative was set up to be epistolary, a narrative limitation that Binge didn’t follow and apparently no editor along the way told him he was only writing like it was a letter to start chapters.   

Extremity is a book that I think has a fantastic set-up, but much like the first Binge I read, I could not jive with the writing style. 

Reviews tend to be extremely personal, as a reader, we all have things that will instantly turn us off to a reading experience, and for me, it can often be first-person narratives. Not always, there are plenty of first-person narratives I do enjoy. Often, those books cause me to forget about how the story is told. It might be a writer’s disease that most readers will not look deeply into. 

First Person is like found footage movies to me. Found footage movies often “break the rules” of the story by doing things like having a running camera set down in a room while people have a private conversation. If you are doing a first-person book, then you have to in my opinion follow the rules and not cheat. Delores Claiborne by King and Malerman’s Incidents Around the House are examples of first-person done perfectly without cheating. 

Nicholas Binge seems intent on using first person but unwilling to accept the limitations of the form.  I can’t suspend disbelief when the POV shifts between first-person narrators, because I start wondering why this person is telling the story now. It shines a spotlight on the wizard behind the curtain constantly, and I am seeing Binge’s motivations, not the characters.  

For him to switch narrators, he had to use the device of starting each point of view shift in a character's name in bold, because a reader wouldn’t know which I was telling the story. If you want a three POV story, in my opinion, it is a bad idea to do it this way. 

Now If that doesn’t bother you, and you think I am being a harsh asshole, let me tell you that Extremity is a high-concept time travel novel combined with police procedural and a bit of cosmic horror. The concept at the core is cool. The execution did not work for me.    

As an example, I will point to page 36-37

“Mark!” Julia shouts, sprinting at full tilt from the other side of the room. The girl darts away, escaping back off into the house with the rifle.

Julia grabs my gun and follows.

I try to get up, but my brain’s in shock all I can think about is the muzzle of that rifle directly in front of my eyes.”

OK, a few things...this passage ends Mark’s POV, and we switch to Julia. In a third-person narrative, I accept the author’s choice of transition. But when it is First person, I am thinking why did Mark stop telling the story with a gun in his face?

Julia Torrimsen: I knew Paul's house like the back of my hand, and by the way the shooter was moving through it, she did too. This is how Julia’s POV starts…

“I followed her left out of the back living room and into the library.”

I see why Binge is withholding POV, and giving us information. Mark was knocked out and John was going to think Julia did it. So then, before the chapter ended, he had to switch POVS again.  This is one example, but the short novel is littered with moments. Are they writing this story? Co-authors? Are they giving testimony? Why these three voices?

Sometimes they are talking to the reader, and other times not. So lets talk about when the characters talk directly to the reader. Sometimes they stay in character but often they tell the story like a novelist, which took me out of Ascension, and it took me out of the story here too.

A shame because there are interesting ideas at work. I like the idea that a time machine becomes one of the worst possible inventions.

“The great machine of our doom. The greatest invention of our time period, the last thing humanity will ever create.”

The stakes of the story are powerful, and I was interested in where it was going, so I finished it despite all my problems with it. Maybe the first-person thing doesn’t bother you, and there is a chance that this time-travel cosmic horror police procedural will work for you. It has much going for it. I wish I could say I loved it, but I gotta be honest. Binge and I have different storytelling approaches but I am sure it will work better for many of you. I don’t personally think he is being served well by editors  

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Lord Running Calm's review of my novel Great America in Dead World

 

 Lord Running Clam is the author of Pink Beam: A Philip K. Dick Companion and long time organizer of the Philip K. Dick Festival.

GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD by David Agranoff (QUOIR 2025) – a brief review by LRC

              This novel was controversial before publication because it employs a method of construction based on a letter by Philip K. Dick circa 1964 in which PKD describes how he wrote his own novels at that time. David Agranoff has turned PKD’s dashed-off letter to Ron Goulart into a formula which he has applied to many of Dick’s novels to see if they align roughly with Dick’s words in this letter. He finds they do and with GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD he uses the formula (Dick’s letter) to write a novel of his own. A literary experiment, if you will. So, how’d it go?

              Kai Dame, our heroine, spends her days as a ‘Janie’ tending to people, mostly old people, while they rest in their pods at their homes and spend as much of their lives as possible in a massive online world known as Great America where they can be young again. Kai, herself, is always playing a never-ending online game the object of which is to kill lone wolf mass murderers chosen from a large database of real-life events. Success in the game supplies credit towards her goal of affording to pay for the best immersive experience possible: Great World Plus. While doing her daily duties cleaning the waste and supplying Foodle to the oldster’s pods, her online avatar keeps her game and other online activities going. A common practice and nobody knows if they’re communicating with a real person or their online avatar.

              In the real world things are not good despite the affirmations  of President Supreme and his lackeys that America is Great Again. Daily temperatures are over 100 F in Los Angeles and the populace stays cool by aid of built-in tech augments. And, of course, the ecosystem is mostly destroyed and people rely on a product called Foodle to survive. Random mass shootings are commonplace and the people, helpless in the face of worldwide disaster, turn more and more to their online lives. And when President Supreme offers Heaven for the Living – a new totally convincing world simulation, the populace, unsurprisingly enough, goes for it. The only problem is it is very expensive and requires each person to have their brain removed and placed in a Brain Box to be connected to the simulation. Here, by immersion in nutrient fluids the brains live on while the personality is transferred into the sim.

              Kai hooks up with Nick, a rich old man whose family want him to go to Heaven with them. But he’s balking, he lives in the bad air-conditioned real world and is afraid to give it up. It is Kai’s job to persuade him to agree to his family’s wishes.

              Meanwhile, Kai’s avatar – her ‘aver’ – is more and more taking on a life of its own, doing things she may or may not want done.

              She meets Roger Greenstone, a high official in the permanent regime of President Supreme and a member of Nick’s family. Greenstone, a person about as morally void as one might suppose you could find, is tasked by the president to solve the problem of the failing Foodle supply from Canada. But, he, too, is looking forward to life in the new Heaven sim. He’s eager to go because he knows the Foodle supply is failing and who wants to tell President Supreme that?

              As to how it all ends, I recommend reading the book which includes a handy Glossary and Afterword by the author.

              There’s a lot going on here and Agranoff applies PKD’s formula as he sees it to good effect. As he states in his Afterword, he tried to write as if PKD himself lived in our present time of 2025 and looked around at the world as it is now and wrote a science fiction novel.  

              Not an easy task but Agranoff is a confident writer and launches himself on his journey to sort it all out PKD-style. It works! But differently, somehow; Philip K. Dick is all over this novel and it is fun noting all the names and references. Reading through PKD’s 1964 letter to Ron Goulart (unfortunately not included in the book) and comparing with GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD you can see how this novel does follow the letter in its own structure. I’ve made no detailed comparison and see Agranoff’s novel as an exciting experiment: a probe into the nature of Philip K. Dick’s style that can only benefit all those who study this great writer. I don’t know if David Agranoff has written or talked about how he handled the multiplicity of problems he faced while writing the book, and this is something he will likely do soon. I look forward to the discussion.

              When I began reading GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD (Ags does have a way with titles!) it reminded me of William Gibson’s NEUROMANCER in that both novels extrapolate from then and now current technologies: circa 1980 and 2025 – but in reverse. GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD reads like a forerunner to NEUROMANCER in that it projects now technology in a way that establishes the nuts and bolts, as it were, of Gibson’s Sprawl. I need to expand on this notion but not here and now.

              Every novel, no matter its structure, is a thing in itself and stands alone. Its excellence lies in the reading experience. Agranoff’s novel is a good read. I read lots of books all at the same time and it is rare that I make it through one without picking up another and reading more there. But, this is a fun straight-ahead story and I rushed through it and, indeed, couldn’t put it down! PKD inspired for sure and a good plot that explores current technological developments in a quasi-PKD way. It also impels a closer look by PKD scholars into how he planned his own novels.

              David Agranoff is to be commended for this experiment.

n  Lord Running Clam, Ward, Colorado July, 2025