Ashes & Rust

by Loren Rhoads

Sex. Drugs. Rock'n'roll. Space aliens. Demonic possession. Murder. Friendship.

Ashes & Rust contains four previously published post-apocalyptic short stories inspired by growing up in Flint, Michigan.

The chapbook's stories originally appeared in Not One of Us, Indigenous Fiction, Blood Rose, and the book Lend the Eye a Terrible Aspect.

45 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 5, 2005

About the author

Loren Rhoads is author of 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel.

Loren is also author of This Morbid Life, a morbid memoir, and Unsafe Words, the first full-length collection of her edgy, award-winning stories.

She's the co-author of Lost Angels and its sequel Angelus Rose. She's also author of the space opera In the Wake of the Templars trilogy: The Dangerous Type, Kill By Numbers, and No More Heroes.

Finally, she's editor of Tales for the Camp Fire, which raised money for survivors of 2018's devastating wildfire in Butte County, California.

Reviews

[Loren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm inordinately fond of my chapbook, which I pulled together to read from at my first Lit Crawl at Borderlands Books in 2005. It contains four science fiction stories inspired by growing up in Flint, Michigan during the crack epidemic. It's illustrated by photos of my friends taken in the 1980s. The new edition includes an updated author commentary.

Of course I'm biased, but I hope you'll check it out for yourself and let me know what you think.

[Kane S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ashes and Rust

46 page chapbook, $5.00 from Automatism Press and as an e-book for Kindle on Amazon.com for 2.99.



Automatism Press

P.O. Box 12308

San Francisco, California 94112-0308

www.charnel.com/automatism



Loren Rhoads may be best known as the mind behind the fascinating decade-long magazine of dark, weird, and often oddly humorous personal anecdotes from various contributors, Morbid Curiosity.

Ashes and Rust is a chapbook reprinting four of her short stories. This distinctive volume includes elements of the past, the future, and more or less the present; the stories inspired by a period of the author’s early life in socio-economically ravaged Flint, Michigan during the fall of the Detroit auto industry. The chapbook is illustrated with black and white photographs taken by Rhoads in 1981 and 1982, of her then high school aged friends. So these are dystopian future tales inspired by a bleak place and time in the 1980s, all authored between 1994 and 2003.

Steeped in murder, horror, and rock-n-roll, The Acid That Dissolves Images, is very short. Composed with dense, energetic description and fresh use of language, it punches home an affecting vignette about the demonic possession of a rock star in a dying world and society, at least one terrifying aspect of whom is known as “Medusa.” As with all these pieces, it summoned to mind such 80s era horror staples as Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice, were they to write in a horrific science fiction vein.

Fitzgerald’s Shadow may be my favorite piece, in large part for a clever weaving of metaphor throughout. The “shadow” seems actually to be heroin, yet perhaps it represents more than that. Again, Rhoads’s powerful use of language is one of her enviable strengths as a writer. “He didn’t shake until the Shadow spilled out of the needle like lava, scalding everything in its path.”

Shadow’s Nick the junkie was a celebrated writer, compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald as the “voice of his generation.” Where ink once flowed from his fingertips, Nick has to fix, now, with a much darker substance, to compose a single sentence a day. His dismal routine on the remains of earth is broken when a slightly injured visitor lands on top of his building from a rocket capsule. Nick naturally assumes that the kid, “Bob,” has been rejected by a moon colony, as everyone who could has left our wretched home planet behind, and they occasionally cast out undesirables. Bob will turn out to be far more than he seems, however.

Throughout, but no less so in Justice, Rhoads constructs a story from only the barest details, letting the reader assemble the meaning of the artfully crafted linguistic fragments. Justice is another yarn of near future urban blight, in this case populated with interstellar drug runners and involving meditations on violent revenge, forgiveness, and justice, all bound together with literal alienation.

Mothflame concerns a young woman named Christy who believes herself to be commissioned by God to return His people to Him through loving acts of homicide. Christy prowls the underground club scene and there is much nihilistic youthful drug abuse and dark sleek androgyny in her quest to get close, in every sense, to the adored singer known as Ysanne.

In the afterword, Rhoads waxes about the fall of the Detroit auto industry and describes how “Devil’s Night,” (Which I remember fairly innocently from my early years in the motor city.), turned into something more resembling its hellfire depiction in The Crow. There is a bittersweet intimacy to this smartly crafted collection. If your bookshelf seems like the section holding the works of Rice and Brite yearns for one addition, this gaunt but memorable 45 page chapbook may be just the thing to round out that empty space at a mere 5 dollars.