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Other Household Toxins
An eclectic collection of 48 flash fictions by Christopher Allen, award-winning author and managing editor of SmokeLong Quarterly.
179 pages, Paperback
First published January 25, 2018
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About the author
Christopher Allen
2 books59 followersChristopher Allen is the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (Matter Press) and Conversations with S. Teri O'Type (a Satire). Allen is a multiple nominee for the Pushcart Anthology, Best of the Net, storySouth's Millions Award and The Best Small Fictions, He has garnered acclaim from Glimmer Train, Indiana Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Exeter Writers, Literal Latté, The Best Small Fictions and many others. Allen lives in Germany and is the managing editor of SmokeLong Quarterly.
Read more at www.imustbeoff.com
Read more at www.imustbeoff.com
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 29, 2018
loved, blurbed ---
In Other Household Toxins, Christopher Allen blends the personal with the fantastical to forge his own remarkable mythology. His stories are widely imaginative and painfully real, rooted in detail as the ground beneath them loosens, the earth turns, familiarity upends, and notions of conventional structure give way to new forms. A master of flash fiction, Allen mines the rich human soil of identity, sexuality, mortality, and violence, twining characters too often trapped in their own private landscapes to access one another. Family are strangers, strangers become family, and love lurks in corners. "We let everyone believe what they wanted. They’d never get us—two men in suits—trying to save the raging, melting space between us" With sentences that cut and gleam, this richly rendered collection (of neighbors, strangers, lovers, ex-lovers, children, fathers, and sons) embodies that raging, melting space between all of us.
In Other Household Toxins, Christopher Allen blends the personal with the fantastical to forge his own remarkable mythology. His stories are widely imaginative and painfully real, rooted in detail as the ground beneath them loosens, the earth turns, familiarity upends, and notions of conventional structure give way to new forms. A master of flash fiction, Allen mines the rich human soil of identity, sexuality, mortality, and violence, twining characters too often trapped in their own private landscapes to access one another. Family are strangers, strangers become family, and love lurks in corners. "We let everyone believe what they wanted. They’d never get us—two men in suits—trying to save the raging, melting space between us" With sentences that cut and gleam, this richly rendered collection (of neighbors, strangers, lovers, ex-lovers, children, fathers, and sons) embodies that raging, melting space between all of us.
July 18, 2018
My blurb for this wonderful collection: "Other Household Toxins" by Christopher Allen could well serve as a flash fiction primer. His prose is an axe: fast, honed, surprising. His stories are smart, fresh, and deeply moving. This is an unforgettable work by a writer of uncommon skill and grace.
April 23, 2018
Such a terrific collection! I was honored to blurb this: 'Allen's stories are convincing, touching portraits of the marginalized. This collection is among the most densely imagined, ingeniously constructed and finely mature works of fiction.'
June 16, 2018
A great set of superbly-engineered tales. Good stories, yes. But I loved the narrative twists and gimmicks used to tell them, though "gimmicks" sounds so cheap and tawdry compared to the reality: smart, creative ways to interact with the reader that I wish I would have thought of. Some favorites: "What I Need to Tell the People on the Train", "A Practiced Silence", "The Birds in the Gate". Many wowzer pieces throughout, but what I liked even more were the wowzer ideas for how to tell stories.
June 18, 2019
These flashes are so good that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by them en masse. Ideally, they need to be read slowly, one by one, so the reader has plenty of time to savor the language, skill, and emotion in each individual story. There’s much foreboding and even menace in these glimpses of lives lived at odds with the characters’ expectations, torqued by need and loss. There is plenty of piercing realism, but some of the stories shade into fantastical and even the grotesque (in a good way). A tree grows down from a roof terrace and ossifies an entire apartment building, an old man with dementia makes a movie in his hospice window every night, a girl wears a dress made of spun sugar with “…red and green robins, delicate white frosting daisies in the collar.” Sometimes Allen is a mad scientist of the flash form, pouring foaming liquids into beakers to see if they combust. He asks the reader to trust him, that he’ll take you on a wild ride that will have an emotional payoff. And these rides almost always hit the mark. However strange the story, we feel the human frailties and emotions underneath.
Yet the most affecting stories in the collection may be the least pyrotechnical. A woman lets the ex-con who fathered her son meet the child, skeptical of his claim to have found Jesus. Though her ex is gentle, her son gets over-excited and she sees him in a new light. “Miko laughs – a new laugh like fire from an automatic weapon.” A woman is haunted all her life by the sacks full of puppies her father made her beat to death on a rock. A middle-aged American woman in Siena finds a gentle Italian man to relive a dream from her youth three weeks before her mastectomy. “Afterward – when her breasts were gone – the memory of feeling like a woman would have to be enough.” A teenage boy is taken out hunting by his much older brother who has survived war, tornadoes, and car accidents and grown “cocky and reckless.” Birdie, the younger brother, “doesn’t give salvation much thought, but he knows a bad feeling when he feels it.… You just have to know when to jump and close your eyes. When to accept the heft of it. When to hold your breath and hope.” And in the haunting story “To Carry Her Home,” the narrator collects the hair of his dead twin sister that he finds around his apartment. “I should vacuum – I will – but I love finding her too much.” These are the stories that linger the longest in the wake of this very fine collection.
Yet the most affecting stories in the collection may be the least pyrotechnical. A woman lets the ex-con who fathered her son meet the child, skeptical of his claim to have found Jesus. Though her ex is gentle, her son gets over-excited and she sees him in a new light. “Miko laughs – a new laugh like fire from an automatic weapon.” A woman is haunted all her life by the sacks full of puppies her father made her beat to death on a rock. A middle-aged American woman in Siena finds a gentle Italian man to relive a dream from her youth three weeks before her mastectomy. “Afterward – when her breasts were gone – the memory of feeling like a woman would have to be enough.” A teenage boy is taken out hunting by his much older brother who has survived war, tornadoes, and car accidents and grown “cocky and reckless.” Birdie, the younger brother, “doesn’t give salvation much thought, but he knows a bad feeling when he feels it.… You just have to know when to jump and close your eyes. When to accept the heft of it. When to hold your breath and hope.” And in the haunting story “To Carry Her Home,” the narrator collects the hair of his dead twin sister that he finds around his apartment. “I should vacuum – I will – but I love finding her too much.” These are the stories that linger the longest in the wake of this very fine collection.
February 12, 2018
As is traditional on Goodreads, I shall now review my own bookbaby. What parent would give his child four stars? So OK: five. Beyond that, I don't really have any interest in telling you how good these stories are. You can decide that for yourself.
Other Household Toxins is an eclectic group of 48 stories and an introduction piece that attempts to explain what flash fiction does. Most readers are aware these days that flash fiction is "any" narrative under 1000 words. I guess that's broadly true, but it's not that simple. Flash is urgent. The best flash pulls the reader through a story with innovative word choice and beautiful sentences (something a good novel and a good short story should do as well--in a perfect world).
I chose these 48 stories because I love each one for one reason or another. These are all intimate narratives that bare some part of me. They are mostly about death--so the entertainment factor is covered. Most of the others are about bad, inept, absent, cruel, dumb fathers. So again: lots of laughs.
The collection is a mix of surrealism, magic realism, absurdism, hyper-realism, and just plain realism (with the tiniest foray into prose poetry). In terms of POV, I'm happy to say Other Household Toxins is schizophrenic in the nicest way. I don't write from a particular POV, so my narrators are men, women, gay, straight--and everything in between.
I'm very happy when readers connect to these stories.
Other Household Toxins is an eclectic group of 48 stories and an introduction piece that attempts to explain what flash fiction does. Most readers are aware these days that flash fiction is "any" narrative under 1000 words. I guess that's broadly true, but it's not that simple. Flash is urgent. The best flash pulls the reader through a story with innovative word choice and beautiful sentences (something a good novel and a good short story should do as well--in a perfect world).
I chose these 48 stories because I love each one for one reason or another. These are all intimate narratives that bare some part of me. They are mostly about death--so the entertainment factor is covered. Most of the others are about bad, inept, absent, cruel, dumb fathers. So again: lots of laughs.
The collection is a mix of surrealism, magic realism, absurdism, hyper-realism, and just plain realism (with the tiniest foray into prose poetry). In terms of POV, I'm happy to say Other Household Toxins is schizophrenic in the nicest way. I don't write from a particular POV, so my narrators are men, women, gay, straight--and everything in between.
I'm very happy when readers connect to these stories.
July 15, 2018
In ‘Other Household Toxins’ Chris Allen seems to grasp the deepest feelings of others effortlessly, whether they be strangers on a train (The Guy I Used To Date), desperately lonely souls (22.0), or children facing cruelty (Out and Away). He glides into the role of a woman facing a mastectomy (Santa Caterina), a street sweeper (The Pain Taster), and even a clown hiding behind her makeup (A Clown’s Lips).
Allen tackles tough themes: domestic violence (The Baring Daylight), suicide (Falling Man), dementia (The Night Cinema), humiliation (Beyond The Fences), the loss of a sibling (What I Need to Tell the People on the Train and To Carry Her Home) .
Dominating the collection are family relationships, and particularly those between fathers and sons: fathers who are uncomprehending (The Birds in the Gate), misguided but well-meaning (The Ground Above My Feet),hopelessly inept (My Boy Winston), absent (Target Practice), uncommunicative (A Practiced Silence).
From the profoundly disturbing (What Strangers Do) to the quirky (The Number 4) to the humorous (Furniture), ‘Other Household Toxins’ has it all. Each cameo story knocks you down and stands over you as you struggle to redress your balance.
The best flash fiction is savoured slowly...which is why it took me a while to write this review.
July 17, 2019
If there is one thing I learned about flash while reading Allen’s collection, it’s just how important every sentence is to the composition as a whole. In a recent (July 2019) flash workshop led by Allen in London, he suggested writing a sentence, then coming back a little later to write another, and so on. This was just one of many flash generating techniques offered in a three-hour class focused on weaving a tapestry of meaning, sentence by sentence, from obscure threads of thought.
In Other Household Toxins, Allen’s attention to detail at the sentence level makes for stories that linger long after the book is put down. One particularly haunting story is Target Practice, which is also anthologized in the Best Small Fictions of 2019. Among the many themes touched upon in this frightening tale is: What happens to sons with mostly absent fathers and, as a result, a lot of unregulated time on their hands?
The title story of the collection is another one of my favorites. In it the narrator struggles to reimagine a formative childhood memory. I’ve reread this story a number of times and each time I come away newly awed by the richness of its structure. It resonates deeply with the desire to cherish those moments from the past we know are life-changing and definitely worth remembering.
I highly recommend this collection!
In Other Household Toxins, Allen’s attention to detail at the sentence level makes for stories that linger long after the book is put down. One particularly haunting story is Target Practice, which is also anthologized in the Best Small Fictions of 2019. Among the many themes touched upon in this frightening tale is: What happens to sons with mostly absent fathers and, as a result, a lot of unregulated time on their hands?
The title story of the collection is another one of my favorites. In it the narrator struggles to reimagine a formative childhood memory. I’ve reread this story a number of times and each time I come away newly awed by the richness of its structure. It resonates deeply with the desire to cherish those moments from the past we know are life-changing and definitely worth remembering.
I highly recommend this collection!
February 28, 2018
These are wonderful flash. There are some spectacular moments, but they don’t just stick to the moments. The moments are integrated into full arcs of an impressive variety of types. Beautiful stuff.
September 29, 2018
This is a book, like other great flash fiction collections, to be savored slowly. Although small in size, each story is colossal in its depth and heart. An incredibly moving and smart body of work.
April 18, 2019
Christopher Allen's new book, Other Household Toxins, is the exploration of many things: death, fathers, trains, lovers and dresses made of sugar. His stories float between the angst of a child and the angst of an adult—in one story I am gutted with tragedy, in the next I laugh, and in the third I am floating in a fairy tale. Together these stories remind us that in each human life there are multiple, contradictory, and complex realities that all manage to co-exist…and they are all equally rely real.
March 21, 2018
An eclectic mix of energising, poignant, insightful, gut-wrenching flash fictions. What I loved most was the fact that the stories were always so full of surprises, and I never knew where they'll carry me.
June 16, 2018
Allen’s stories are a delight. An eclectic mixture of protagonists and plots, they are energetic and urgent, surprising and poignant. The writing is sharp, polished, assured and mature - an accomplished wordsmith with a lot to say.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews