Joe Surkiewicz's Blog - Posts Tagged "fiction"

The Road to Goshen Shoals by Paul W Valentine

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It starts with a simple premise: a reporter in 1970 goes back to the rural North Carolina county where he was raised to find his black playmate from circa 1940. What happened to him? How have the tumultuous decades treated him? Arlis, the reporter, has even convinced his editor there might be a story. Valentine's prose grabbed me right from the start, the words of his dying mother in her lilting North Carolinian voice that also set up the train of mysteries that Arlis uncovers during his search. It's a multi-layered book that had me thinking of Balzac as I read it--things are never as they appear on the surface. But once you get beneath, Arlis uncovers layers of human fear, mistrust, anxiety, and ultimately violence that explore race and the complexities of life.Much of his dialog resembles interior thought, which threw me off at first. But ultimately I learned to depend on it and enjoy it. Valentine is a masterful writer. No, not all the mysteries are solved in The Road to Goshen Shoals, which isn't the point. It's a great read by a gifted writer. One mystery not addressed is why this book wasn't picked up by a major publisher. Kirkus Reviews gave it an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Highly recommended.



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Horror Sleaze Trash: Prose in Poor Taste by Arthur Graham

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In his forward, editor Arthur Graham writes that HST "has always been a place for the writers and the stories shunned by publishers of the bland and inoffensive” and invites writers to keep sending him their off-the-wall and otherwise unpublishable shit. Prose in Poor Taste is a collection of the best from HST, and it rocks. The stories, nearly all of them, are good--short, sharp, startling, obscene, hilarious, unconventional, in your face, against the grain. HST is an oasis of sanity (or insanity) in an ocean of pretentious "literary" websites. (For what it's worth, I avoid websites with literary, journal or review in the title.) HST/Prose in Poor Taste cuts through the crap and delivers. So why only four stars? Gotta leave room for Orwell, Chandler, Ellroy and the other masters. My only question: When's the next collection of HST prose fiction?




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