Dead Boys: Stories

by Richard Lange

These hard-hitting, deeply felt stories follow straight arrows and outlaws, have-it-alls and outcasts, as they take stock of their lives and missteps and struggle to rise above their turbulent pasts. A salesman re-examines his tenuous relationship with his sister after she is brutally attacked. A house painter plans a new life for his family as he plots his last bank robbery. A drifter gets a chance at love when he delivers news of a barfly's death to the man's estranged daughter. A dissatisfied yuppie is oddly envious of his ex-con brother as they celebrate their first Christmas together.


Set in a Los Angeles depicted with aching clarity, Lange's stories are gritty, and his characters often less than perfect. Beneath their macho bravado, however, they are full of heart and heartbreak.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Noir, Crime, Ebooks, Short Story Collection, American

256 pages, Hardcover

First published August 14, 2007

About the author

Author of Joe Hustle, Rovers, The Smack, Sweet Nothing, Angel Baby, This Wicked World, and Dead Boys.

Reviews

[Del · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd read a review of Richard Lange's vampire novel Rovers and thought it sounded promising, but I'd never heard of him before, and I spotted he had this short story collection, so I thought I'd dip into this first and see how I liked his writing. I'm happy to report that I liked it A LOT. This is exceptional; a series of moments viewed through cracked, dirty glass; we dip into the lives of various losers, junkies, wastrels, and folks who seem utterly baffled by where they've found themselves (He returns to his spot on the couch and sits with his head in his hands. I’d trade any ten people I know for one of him. His desolation is as beautiful as a broken mirror.). It's spare, and shocking, and beautiful. There are no happy endings. When we come across someone who is actually managing to hold together a relationship, we're reminded that this is no rom-com: Mostly, though, we’re fine. We keep it simple. She likes strawberry daiquiris, silver jewelry, and anything with Gene Kelly in it. I know what kind of flowers to buy on her birthday, and we need about the same amount of sleep. I have heard her crying in the bathroom when she thinks the shower is drowning it out, but we’re still rolling along, and that’s better than most.

In the wrong hands, this could all be unbearably grim, but the writing is a treasure, and because we're only getting brief glimpses into these existences, it leaves us wanting more. I've just discovered another favourite writer, I think.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this on a five hour flight to Boston and it was hands down the best choice I could have made to while away the hours--fantastic writing, gritty realism, imperfect yet sympathetic characters struggling to find love and happiness in Southern California (quite a feat for anyone who's tried, if you've lived there you know what I mean). LA is the perfect backdrop to a lot of these stories--boulevard of broken dreams and all that. And Lange is just so damn good at including seemingly insignificant details to set the stage for his characters without bogging the reader down. You could easily read this in a few hours, so why are you wasting time reading my rambling review? Get to it!

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of stories you read that make you say "Man I wish I could write like that." Anyway, these are probably my favorite kind of short stories. No hifalutin prose that leaves you wondering what you just read. Nothing about affluent people who get their feelings hurt. No dense trickery. Never boring. Maybe they're not for everyone. I'll read stories like this and think of regrets and losses and choices made both good and bad. I've since bought some of Lange's novels and am looking forward to reading them. I bought this book several years ago on a recommendation and was glad I had. I've read them slowly of the past few years skipping around in the order. A few more than once. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes a well done short story.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a white man. I am almost certainly under-employed. I once had success with women, but I have now fallen into loneliness. I often fantasize about sleeping with women I will never approach. If I don't do this, I sleep with prostitutes. In any case, I have women problems. My friends aren't really friends, just other people sharing my immediate space. I have a tendency to use metaphors or analogies which are, to put it mildly, hackneyed. Moon, milk, blood, water, dripping. "The sun... sliced into us like laser beams." You get the point. I am the character in each of these stories.

There is the one protagonist, one sentence length, one tone throughout this entire collection. Each story on its own is pretty good. Lange can write, no doubt about it. But boy does it get tiresome over the length of a book. It's really worth three stars, but Goodreads' scale is so skewed that I could only give it 2. Basically, it's worth a weekend read from the library. I hope his novel is a little more varied than these stories.

[Dwayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starting off strong with “Fuzzyland,” Richard Lange’s 12 story collection is great in parts. There aren’t any bad stories here, let me just say that straight up, but if there were more stories like the aforementioned “Fuzzyland,” it really would be a great collection.
Lange’s stories are atmospheric and don’t rely on plot, much like the stories in Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, a collection that Lange has named as one of his fave books. The similarities between the two anthologies are apparent, (the characters who are addicts, nonsensical violence, seedy locales...) and Lange is more than a competent writer. He gets the job done. My thing is this- if your story isn’t gonna have a clear sequence of events, then your writing has to be top-tier, and this is my main issue with this collection. Quite a few of these stories need some kind of plot to make them more interesting.
The best story here is “Love Lifted Me,” and it’s the one I can see myself coming back to in the future. I can see myself also coming back to “Bank of America,” “Long Lost” and “The Hero Shot,” but “Love Lifted Me” has all the elements of a great story and resonated the most with me.
With all that said, would I still recommend it? I’ve listed 5 stories here that are good to great out of a 12 story collection. Without mentioning any other story, I’ve given two thumbs up to almost half the book. So yes; yes I would recommend it. Just don’t expect Jesus’ Son.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well I read 'Dead Girls' earlier this year and have to balance it out.

In these stories of LA every fucker's fucked. They're feckless, fickle, failures, all the fs. They're fighters and schemers, two or three timers having breakdowns or psychotic episodes. All first person male pov. Not much that is good happens. In 'Long Lost' for example, not only does a boy who has hitched a lift survive an attempt at rape from the driver (A few miles down the road he started in. "You like cock? You sure look like you would." Ain't nothing for free.) but once he escapes he finds a baby, hardly alive, wrapped in a blanket on the highway which later dies. Older he's a junkie, and in order to get painkillers he agrees to be knocked over the head with a pipe (not one you smoke) and taken to hospital ("Hey where do they keep all the drugs in this town?") but all he ends up with is "Tylenol. Fucking Tylenol." So they drive to a dealers house, smash his door down and steal his stash. Stopping off at McDonalds customers scream and threaten over unwanted tartar sauce.

Add to this a somewhat overegged sentimentality (a lot of crying going on), not much variety of tone, little humour, I did at first react against - certainly after the first couple of stories I was ready to give this three stars (for the writing: sharp descriptions, good action, complicated stories stuffed with strange incident), but after a while Lange won me over, the relentless tone made inroads, I got immersed in this grungey side of LA, where to walk down the street in your own neighbourhood can be an ordeal. I got to 'enjoy' their little escapades, in one of the finest stories (to me) 'Blind Made Products' the 'hero' gets wrecked at a party where the men dress in women's clothes (I thought it was only British men - not me, I might add - who enjoyed that) and they all drive out into the desert and set fire to a car for insurance (it all makes sense believe me):

There's a loud roar, and the sun rises inside the car, finds itsef trapped by the roof, and so forces itself out wherever it can. A fiery arm reaches for us. Grady runs but I don't see the point. The air begins to crackle around me, and hot fingers caress my cheeks, my nose, plunge into my eyes. My tongue crumbles into ash when I laugh, my teeth are nubbins of coal.

Grady yanks me backward by my collar. He rolls me in the sand to put out the fire. I sit next to the Joshua tree in the mud my piss made and stroke the remnants of the dress that still clings to me. The clothes I'm wearing beneath it are untouched. Across the road the [car:] pops and whistles, a musical inferno. Birds chirp in the false dawn, jackrabbits awaken confused.

My rule of thumb with short story writers is would I want to read another story by him/her? The answer is definitely yes, this is a real writer, if a little narrow in subject matter. This book also reminded me (like My Dark Places) never to move to LA.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two recent story recent story collections represent a particular strain of American short story writing represented by master such as Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver and also the harsh viewpoint on American life found in Dashiell Hammett, James M Cain, and Nathaniel West. These two collections are Knockemstiff by Donald ray Pollock and Dead Boys by Richard Lange. Set in the wildly disparate environments of low rent L.A. and the hollow of Knockemstiff, Ohio. One urban and one rural but both decaying and filled with terrifying extremes of humanity, and in both the setting is a major character, the one that is in every story. Both collections you should also dip into every once in awhile rather than all at once, as the stories are dense and intense but also might have their individual charms overlook for the general atmosphere of the books. These are low rent lives (some of Lange’s character approach middle class while Pollock’s are universally dirty poor) filled with guns, drugs, terrible decisions, with the only light in the tunnel an oncoming train (who did I steal that from?) but delivered with pitch black humor, impressive language, and a lived in compassion that never makes them feel exploitive and gives them their own grandeur. The authors know these characters and so do you.

[Jack Knorps · Rating 4 out of 5]

This old review indicates that I read this book in 2 days. So it's a page-turner. Richard Lange did not achieve a great following after this, sadly. At least so far as I can tell. I can google authors and try to assess their more recent work, but I'd rather not, because this book is a triumph. His style calls to mind Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and maybe even Dennis Cooper a little bit. The stories are sometimes bizarre, yet totally relevant to many lives (particularly in L.A.) during that era of the late aughts. It was a fun trip to take. I really haven't heard much about Richard Lange at all, except that a friend recommended this book to me, in the wake of my departure from L.A., and no one else (nor any other publications, podcasts, writing classes, etc.) has referenced or recommended him. So even though I think he wrote for Rolling Stone magazine, and even though it is lovingly packaged by Back Bay Books (which I know published Infinite Jest), it feels vaguely "underground"--so I would describe it as "mainstream underground" fiction. A good book for those struggling with substance abuse, past or current criminal activity, estranged siblings and children and parents, life in Los Angeles (all of the dreams and disillusions), and human beings in general that want to work on their compassion. This isn't one of my idiosyncratic bete-noires; this is an overlooked gem that I hope will continue to be found and admired. I just want to tack-on Ottessa Moshfegh. Because her work seems to have picked up where books like this left off.

http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008...

[Patrick O'Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Lange's writing can get a little dark. There's a lot of tension with characters and their interactions. The situations and scenes are bleak and it never looks like they're ever going to get better. Los Angeles' grittier neighborhoods are his backdrop. The working class, or maybe it's better to say the not working class are his subject matter. Dope fiends, drunks, tweekers, losers, stalkers, paranoids, and pantie gropers are some of the characters he chronicles. Failed relationships, wasted lives, misunderstood emotions, dead-end jobs, and dysfunctional families are just a few of the scenarios he examines. Dead Boys, a collection of short stories, is a strong debut effort. My only problem with the book is his protagonist, the narrator - the constant character throughout the book. Although it is apparent he isn't supposed to be the same person - there is still an un-likableness about him. His dissatisfaction with his life and those around him is always present. His actions are sleazy, yet contrived, as if it's a formula. His attitude sucks, and not in a good or acceptable "fuck-the-world" sort of way. But more in, "look at how messed up all these other scumbags are, I am better than them." I don't necessarily need to like the protagonist to like a book. But I need to care about somebody. Give a shit about at least one character and with Lange's none of them are worth caring about. In the end when I finished the book I thought, "ok, that was bleak, but so what."

[Jane Angle]

A work close to my heart. The real America today: shoddily-built apartment complexes, a man's father telling him that he can't tell his "family" about him. Frazzled, angry single moms in stained t-shirts. And when all is lost, you end up at the Donut Shop.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being a resident of Los Angeles now, I was drawn to this collection of short stories by LA writer Richard Lange when I came across it in a local bookstore. Each one takes place in this city of broken dreams, and each one chronicles a different hard-luck protagonist, down on his luck (always a his, never a her), trying to salvage something from a life that's been mostly tough.

Lange's blue-collar-wizened, truncated prose voice, drawing heavily from Raymond Carver, isn't exactly original, but it's got a nice rhythm to it and he's good with details of setting and people. He's not big on plotting. The structure of most of the tales involves a repressed, miserable deadbeat giving us a tour of his miserable life. His main characters are interchangeable. All speak in the first person. All sound exactly the same. Each is a at a different place on a narrative spectrum that starts at tentatively happy but with a dark cloud on the horizon, and ends at depressed and crazy.

But the supporting roles are often memorable, like Mr. Ho, an embattled Korean grocery store owner in "Loss Prevention," and Adam, a suicidal douchebag office drone in the book's titular story. Dead Boys is extremely readable, though I can already its individual parts merging into a single blur of drunkenness, failed relationships, and dead-end jobs.

[kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best book of short stories I've read in a while. All of Lange's characters are men--hard men, embattled men, misunderstood men. Men who live in shitty hotels and downtown LA walkups and mix with all kinds of criminals and low lives. Standouts for me was "Bank of America," about a family man who plans a bank robbery, and "Long Lost," about a man and his brother who rediscover each other and attempt to move beyond their criminal pasts. The writing here is beautifully descriptive and Lange has a great understanding of people's psyches, he manages to write about the most unlikeable of characters with a grace that reminds you that the character is writing about is, after all, still a human being.

The only criticism I have of this book is the fact that all of Lange's protagonists are male, and all of his stories are written in the first person. Despite the fact that he writes well, after awhile, one story seems bleed into the next with no narrative variety. I won't judge him too harshly for that right now, however, as I understand that he has recently written a novel with a female protagonist. I'll check that out and keep Richard Lange on my radar.

[Sean Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Lange's "Dead Boys" has the makings of a great short story collection. He has a terrific sense of place and the characters are interesting and there's just enough plot to keep the stories headed somewhere. However, something goes wrong about halfway through the collection. While the first few stories feature characters in some pretty grim circumstances by the second half things have turned so bad that it's cartoonish. In one of the first stories there's a woman fighting with her ex over the kids over the backdrop of California wildfires. In the second half there's a man haunted by his ex-wife's ghost while he lives out his days with heroin addicted hookers in a pay by the week motel. The success of the early stories came from the recognizable and relatable characters. The failure of the later stories is in a big part attributable to the preposterous characters. The language gets a little too "gritty" and "noir" cliched as well. Lange has some real talent, but he needs to curb some of these tendencies.

[Colin Brightwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Closer to about 4.5 stars.

Richard Lange offers up an interesting debut collection of “crime” fiction. I say “crime” in quotes because there are crimes, and there are desperate criminals, and there’s a gritty hopeless undercurrent of noir in these stories, but this collection is also highly “literary.” Quite the excellent breeding ground between genre and literary.

Lange writes these stories so well. And while this collection may not be for everyone, Lange perfectly captures the lies men tell themselves on a daily basis, until they ruin them.

Standouts were:
“Fuzzyland”
“Bank of America”
“Long Last”
“Love Lifted Me”
“Loss Prevention”

Excellent use and control of voice and tone in every story.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first two stories in this collection are jaw-droppingly amazing, and there's lots more incredible ones to follow. This guy knows how to hone in on details, establish setting, and voice. The only thing is that every story is first person. You want to read it straight through and you do, but then stories start running together, and no matter who's telling the story, it sounds like the same dude. Still, this is an unforgettable book.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

a great debut collection... Having spent the last 9 years of my life living in California as a relatively young person (I am now 34) there is plenty here that I identified with. As mentioned in a few of the other reviews the stories do seem to blend into one another from an overall narrative tone... but Lange's style is still dynamic. Definitely a writer I plan to keep on the radar.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gotta love the syringe spinning slow circles in the swimming pool of the shitty motel.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has sat on my shelf for 10+ years and so I finally picked it up, reading one story each day on my commute. It's definitely a collection that benefits from spacing out one's reading like that because otherwise the twelve stories would just completely melt into oneanother. They're all set in and around Los Angeles and feature the first-person viewpoint of a 25-40 year-old white man who (with one exception) is deeply alienated from the world around him.

The men in these stories are generally stuck in dead-end jobs (salesman, house painter, newsstand vendor, motel clerk, etc.), live in decaying neighborhoods, consume various intoxicants (alcohol, drugs, etc.), and have fraying to imaginary relationships with women of varying stability. They are souls either deadened or driven to rage by the banalities of life, even as they daydream of what shoulda-coulda-might still be.

Just to give a sense of what lies ahead, the book opens with a story about a man who drives to San Diego with his wife to visit his sister, who has just been raped, and they navigate a series of uncomfortable encounters with her kids, her ex-husband, a neighbor, and eventually head into Tijuana on an oxy run, all as wildfires threaten the sister's condo. Elements the pervade the book are all there -- the threat of domestic destruction, the difficulty of wrestling with family, the burden and joy of children, drugs, bad choices, and rivulets of anger waiting to explode.

While I generally found each individual story to be compelling and the writing to be very sharp, with surprising moments of insight and humor, it's hard not to read them as a group of variations on the same theme. That got somewhat stale for me especially as they refuse to offer false hopes of redemption or change. Not surprisingly, probably my favorite story is the one that does -- the story of an unlikely bank robber saving to buy a house in the mountains so he can get his lovely wife and kid out of the horrible city. It's also got the most conventional plot of the collection, which makes me wonder if there might not be an excellent crime novel in Lange's future. (I just checked and it looks like he's written several crime novels since this collection, so I think I'll definitely try one out.)

[John O’Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Lange’s collection of tales is simultaneously bleak, humorous, poignant and optimistic, depicting kitchen sink snapshots of the lives of ordinary but roguish and complex men struggling in various ways in the city of angels. Aside from the first story, which I found to be my least favourite/the weakest, from the second story onwards I was gripped and Lange’s writing style is of a high enough quality and creative/inventive enough to keep the reader gripped and invested right until the bittersweet conclusion.

A short story collection that can stand alongside Dubliners, Goodbye to Berlin and Dark Tales when it comes to originality and quality.

[Nick DiNatale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another review mentions that that characters tend to be cut from the same mold in most of the stories, which is accurate. While the characters tend to lack diversity, the stories are compelling and feel very real and true to what Los Angeles embodies. A few of the stories stand above the others and I was genuinely disappointed when they ended.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stealing from Kirkus beacuse it can't be said much better: Superlative short fiction, and an arresting debut.... these men are misfits, screw-ups and sociopaths, and these stories capture them at the moment when their brittle, circumscribed lives finally shatter

[David Olsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mega-talented short story writer. All of these miscreants and dwellers in the underbelly of Los Angeles are brimming with complexity, love, struggle, and life. Everything about these stories is special.

[Tori Tomaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book was almost good. very well written but almost like a song that gets cut off at the hook. every story ended right as the chorus was about to start. the lack of continuity in general made this a hard and slow read

[ChristineT · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was unique and suspenseful and I enjoyed all the different stories taking place in California.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very angry men. Good women with redemptive love. I read the first five stories and that was enough.

[Craigtator · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sad sacks trying to make it through each day. Definitely Raymond Carver / Denis Johnson territory.

[Andrew Takeuchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection of short stories - several very authentic Los Angeles portraits

[Daniel Polansky]

Short stories in the 'meth-addicted Angeleno returns to his mother's house in Pasadena to obsess over his ex-wife' vein. Well-executed but predictable.

[Mysticpt · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 +

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somehow I can’t get enough of these misfits, losers, and failures sleepwalking through the squalid sections of LA.