Leave Luck to Heaven

by Brian Oliu

Leave Luck to Heaven is a collection of lyric essays with haunted, haunting reflections on the following classic games:

Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, Maniac Mansion, River City Ransom, Adventure Island, Metroid, Bubble Bobble, Double Dribble, Rampage, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, Balloon Fight, Goonies II, Dragon Warrior, Kid Icarus, RBI Baseball, Tetris, Ghosts 'N Goblins, and more.

These gorgeous essays are not like other essays. They are not paeans to nostalgia. They are mortality, obsession, love, hunger, need, and strangeness. They are the weird, painful things we made NES games carry for us because we didn't know where else to put them.

169 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2014

About the author

Brian Oliu currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His publications include three chapbooks and five full-length collections of nonfiction, ranging on topics from Craigslist Missed Connections, to computer viruses, to the arcade game NBA Jam. He has two projects forthcoming in 2021: a collaborative chapbook on the Rocky films with the poet Jason McCall, “What Shot Did You Ever Take,” by The Hunger Press, and a full-length collection of essays, “Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling” by The University of North Carolina Press.

Reviews

[Brian Oliu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is less of a review & more of an ars poetica of the book itself. Leave Luck to Heaven is a book I started two houses ago in a body and a life that seems so incredibly long ago, but is still very much here, every day, as a reminder of where things came from. People ask me if it is a book about video games, & it very much is, but it’s also a book about learning how to deal with living a “childhood well wasted,”—of taking these moments & memories & trying to find out what, if anything, these games taught us.

The answer is a lot, surprisingly: it was a book that started as one essay that grew into two, then eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, then another nine, then another four, then another five.

I don’t know what you will learn if you read this book—that’s the problem with the lyric essay: there are things to learn, certainly, but the purpose is to go on a journey with the author, for the reader to somehow link in to the emotional leaps of the author.

I know that there’s nothing more boring than watching someone play videogames—there is something to the whole medium that requires interaction from its audience. My goal and hope for this book is that as you read, you play alongside me: that you make leaps over lava, that you hold fire in your hands, that you fall to nothingness only to reappear where you started. That you find the secrets that I found while writing, and then some.

[William Hoffacker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I like video games and because I had read some of the author's essays around the internet and enjoyed them. What I found inside is unlike any other book I own. Lately I've become interested in the burgeoning genre of "video game writing," reading entertaining works of art based on artful works of entertainment. All of the essays in this collection take their titles from NES video games, but they immediately transcend that starting point. If you are a gamer, you will enjoy the references to save points and iconic inventory items (et cetera) sprinkled throughout the book. More importantly, even if you have no history with video games, I recommend reading Brian Oliu's work. His winning sense of humor shines through in every essay, while his proficiency with lyrical prose adds layers of pathos to each page. 'Leave Luck to Heaven' pushes beyond nostalgia and brings new literary light to the world of games and gamers. Read it!

[Chance Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a collection of lyric essays, each one with the title of a video game. Maniac Mansion. Super Mario Bros. 3. Kid Icarus. Etc. It has the best epigraph ever: "There are secrets where fairies don't live." -- Old Man, Legend of Zelda. Sometimes the essays mimic the rhythm of a game ("Dragon Warrior": I go then you go then I wait) and sometimes they include very sly references to the game. A sample line from "Simon's Quest": "The day we begin to collect the things to put back together in order to destroy the sum of its parts is the day you tell us that they are taking you away from you and I am terrified of what is left to be said and will be left of me at some point." I just love that.

However, when the essays move from game to personal (I'm assuming, there are a lot of "I's" and "you's" and I'm not sure who "I" and "you" are, they seem to shift a lot) I get lost. When this happens, it feels like a big inside joke. I'm not on the inside, and I don't get it.

[Kevin Stebner · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the endless hunt for VG verse, we've come across Leave Luck to Heaven (*what Nintendo translates to btw). This collection of lyric essays are actually something closer to prose poems. The scope of the book is excellent, going through a veritable hit list of classic NES titles. The problem here is the monotonous voice and flat tone through the entire book. Instead of immersing us in the vivid colour and action, we get endless "I am this" and "you are that" exposition. The only way one can tell if we're in, say, Contra or Bubble Bobble is passing reference to running. Same tone, a LOT of telling what is. There is some joy here in hunting out a reference only a gamer would know.

Certainly, as a whole, stronger than most poetic forays into video game as subject.
Are there a some good lines though? For sure. Immersive? Somewhat. Play Again? Nah, let's let the timer run out.