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Sacred Smokes
Growing up in a gang in the city can be dark. Growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago is a whole different story. This book takes a trip through that unexplored part of Indian Country, an intense journey that is full of surprises, shining a light on the interior lives of people whose intellectual and emotional concerns are often overlooked. This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians. He will be in readers' heads for a long time to come.
176 pages, Paperback
First published August 15, 2018
10 people are currently reading
2943 people want to read
About the author
Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.
24 books145 followersTheodore C. Van Alst Jr is the author of Chicago-set award-winning story collections Sacred Smokes and Sacred City as well as the editor of The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones. His co-edited (with Shane Hawk) Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology was published in September 2023 by Vintage / Penguin Random House and has been a finalist for the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Awards. His Southern Gothic novella Pour One for the Devil was released by Lanternfish Press in March 2024 and his third collection of linked stories, Sacred Folks, was published Fall 2024 by the University of New Mexico Press. His debut novel, The El, will be published by Vintage / Penguin Random House in 2025. His work has appeared in Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Chicago Review, The Journal of Working-Class Studies, Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Apex Magazine, Red Earth Review, Indian Country Today, and elsewhere.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 35 reviews
January 31, 2021
I did not enjoy this short book and struggled to finish. It is about some Natives in Chicago living the thug life. It seemed like all they did was abuse substances, steal, and beat or kill others. I am in the minority as many others have rated this book really high so maybe it’s just me and not the book.
I did really like a couple of quotes from the book. This first was “Your face is the cover to your book. And if you look out and off to the side from it, under the scratched-out title, well, no one can read that, can they?” The second was, “Anyway, it was just him and me talking and all cool like, you know, like when you’re reading a book and it’s just you and the writer, like that.” Both quotes really spoke to me especially the one about feeling a connection with the writer while reading.
I did really like a couple of quotes from the book. This first was “Your face is the cover to your book. And if you look out and off to the side from it, under the scratched-out title, well, no one can read that, can they?” The second was, “Anyway, it was just him and me talking and all cool like, you know, like when you’re reading a book and it’s just you and the writer, like that.” Both quotes really spoke to me especially the one about feeling a connection with the writer while reading.
October 2, 2020
city-Indian linked short stories of a boy growing up on very mean streets of Chicago, with books, drugs, pop, and violence as his hand maids. has the roughest articulation mixed with thoughtful and loving wondering. has such powerful and beautiful sentences.
June 23, 2018
An excellent read by a truly unique voice. It's not a "traditional" novel with standard setup-conflict-resolution but rather a collection of smaller stories, anecdotes, recollections, etc. woven through the eyes of a young man (shifting between teens and young adulthood) growing up in Chicago and reaching out into the world beyond. The stories themselves - and the background of the protagonist as a Native American kid born and raised in the inner city - are not incidental, but they inform rather than define what to me makes the book sing: the words. The ideas, the references to - and riffing on - the 70s and 80s pop culture in both subtle and obvious ways. But mostly the words. Almost every page has a sentence (or several) that you keep going back to. I'm always a sucker for great and interesting prose.
September 24, 2018
I highly recommend Sacred Smokes, a compelling Chicago story cycle by Theodore C Van Alst Jr. It is somehow both hard-boiled and emotional, hilarious and poignant. One punchy story ends; immediately the eye is caught by the opening line of the next, pulling the reader further. Without a doubt, Sacred Smokes is a great contemporary urban Native American work that will make you think, laugh and cry. Although it is being marketed as fiction, it is mostly memoir. The style, while distinct, is at times a bit reminiscent of Harlan Ellison, Stephen Graham Jones, and even Nelson Algren.
February 7, 2019
My review for the Chicago Tribune: https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifest...
Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. opens his profound, profane and propulsive debut short story collection, “Sacred Smokes,” with an epigraph from “Indians of Oregon, Plateau, and Plains.” Quoting an Indian agent speaking of the Sioux tribes in the 1850s, this move tacitly recognizes that Chicago in the 1970s and ’80s is perhaps not the first place one might picture when thinking of Native Americans.
And yet in the tour de force of an opening story, “Old Gold Couch,” that’s exactly the milieu he plunges the reader into, writing of the locality where the young narrator, Teddy, and his ne’er-do-well dad “lived in a few different places on the North Side — roach motels, converted SROs, dumpy apartments, tiny studios,” playing out their lives as “a teenage gangbanger” and “a middle-aged alcoholic,” two “Indians in the city, mostly unmoored and ignorant in more ways than I can count.”
Irreverent, voice-driven and deeply emotional, these 12 linked stories — all seen through the keen eye of Teddy — guide the reader through an intricate and often violent landscape, a place where kids come of age, or wretchedly do not get the chance.
Van Alst is an associate professor and director of indigenous nations studies at Portland State University, but he draws on his own experiences growing up in his hometown of Chicago, rendering a setting as vivid as any of his characters. “Uptown, land of my birth. I love you,” he writes in the acknowledgments. “Then, still, and always. #(expletive)gentrification.”
All manner of male anti-social behavior receives exploration here, along with various forms of oppression from the smallest microaggressions to the biggest systemic issues. But Van Alst never sacrifices the pleasures of a good read to any kind of agenda, and his deadly dark sense of humor and the joy he takes in language itself shine from every page.
In “The Lordsprayer,” for instance, he renders a tense passage of father-son dialogue with characteristic idiosyncrasy and comic energy: “Where ya goin’?/ Outtoplay./ Really?/ Guess so./ D’y’know the Lordsprayer?/ What?/ The Lordsprayer./ Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed-bethyname./ No, I guess not./ Well, when you do, you can go out and play./ Well. What the (expletive) is that? The Lordsprayer? I don’t know what that is. And I say so.” This admission sets the story up to take an unexpected survey of the household’s bookshelves, revealing assorted intellectual and psychological concerns that carry the narrator to his teens when he is moved nearly to tears reading “a mention of our people, the Blackfoot Sioux, on page 423 of ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.’ ”
Specificity and individuality are among the best strategies for writers who seek to avoid stereotypes; if one depicts a person as just that, a person, then one is less likely to try to make them stand for an entire group of people. Van Alst depicts each of his characters — even the most arguably unsympathetic among them — with depth and nuance.
In “Jagg’d,” he delivers a portrait of Teddy’s friend, Gooch, who is paralyzed from the waist down as the result of a gang shooting in which “some Harrison Gent put six bullets in his back, ... reloaded and gave him one more for luck.” The two of them drop acid because “Gooch loves taking acid. He also loves drinking, smoking weed, and doing tic, and hitting the rag, and everything else he can think of that I think can take him out of this … chair.”
As problematically as almost everyone in the book behaves, Van Alst shows the complicated web of reasons they have for doing so, unsentimentally but empathetically illustrating how hard each of them has to struggle to survive in a world not structured to function in their favor.
Thanking Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Alan McPherson, “the very first person to encourage my writing,” Van Alst notes that when he and McPherson first met, “he told me to ‘write like whatever you’re saying is the most important thing being said in the world at that moment.’ ” In this brief, essential and absorbing collection, Van Alst does just that. Don’t miss it.
Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. opens his profound, profane and propulsive debut short story collection, “Sacred Smokes,” with an epigraph from “Indians of Oregon, Plateau, and Plains.” Quoting an Indian agent speaking of the Sioux tribes in the 1850s, this move tacitly recognizes that Chicago in the 1970s and ’80s is perhaps not the first place one might picture when thinking of Native Americans.
And yet in the tour de force of an opening story, “Old Gold Couch,” that’s exactly the milieu he plunges the reader into, writing of the locality where the young narrator, Teddy, and his ne’er-do-well dad “lived in a few different places on the North Side — roach motels, converted SROs, dumpy apartments, tiny studios,” playing out their lives as “a teenage gangbanger” and “a middle-aged alcoholic,” two “Indians in the city, mostly unmoored and ignorant in more ways than I can count.”
Irreverent, voice-driven and deeply emotional, these 12 linked stories — all seen through the keen eye of Teddy — guide the reader through an intricate and often violent landscape, a place where kids come of age, or wretchedly do not get the chance.
Van Alst is an associate professor and director of indigenous nations studies at Portland State University, but he draws on his own experiences growing up in his hometown of Chicago, rendering a setting as vivid as any of his characters. “Uptown, land of my birth. I love you,” he writes in the acknowledgments. “Then, still, and always. #(expletive)gentrification.”
All manner of male anti-social behavior receives exploration here, along with various forms of oppression from the smallest microaggressions to the biggest systemic issues. But Van Alst never sacrifices the pleasures of a good read to any kind of agenda, and his deadly dark sense of humor and the joy he takes in language itself shine from every page.
In “The Lordsprayer,” for instance, he renders a tense passage of father-son dialogue with characteristic idiosyncrasy and comic energy: “Where ya goin’?/ Outtoplay./ Really?/ Guess so./ D’y’know the Lordsprayer?/ What?/ The Lordsprayer./ Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed-bethyname./ No, I guess not./ Well, when you do, you can go out and play./ Well. What the (expletive) is that? The Lordsprayer? I don’t know what that is. And I say so.” This admission sets the story up to take an unexpected survey of the household’s bookshelves, revealing assorted intellectual and psychological concerns that carry the narrator to his teens when he is moved nearly to tears reading “a mention of our people, the Blackfoot Sioux, on page 423 of ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.’ ”
Specificity and individuality are among the best strategies for writers who seek to avoid stereotypes; if one depicts a person as just that, a person, then one is less likely to try to make them stand for an entire group of people. Van Alst depicts each of his characters — even the most arguably unsympathetic among them — with depth and nuance.
In “Jagg’d,” he delivers a portrait of Teddy’s friend, Gooch, who is paralyzed from the waist down as the result of a gang shooting in which “some Harrison Gent put six bullets in his back, ... reloaded and gave him one more for luck.” The two of them drop acid because “Gooch loves taking acid. He also loves drinking, smoking weed, and doing tic, and hitting the rag, and everything else he can think of that I think can take him out of this … chair.”
As problematically as almost everyone in the book behaves, Van Alst shows the complicated web of reasons they have for doing so, unsentimentally but empathetically illustrating how hard each of them has to struggle to survive in a world not structured to function in their favor.
Thanking Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Alan McPherson, “the very first person to encourage my writing,” Van Alst notes that when he and McPherson first met, “he told me to ‘write like whatever you’re saying is the most important thing being said in the world at that moment.’ ” In this brief, essential and absorbing collection, Van Alst does just that. Don’t miss it.
December 2, 2020
Sacred Smokes is a dope book. Learned a lot about my new Twitter buddy, @TVAyyyy. You've gotta love the stream of consciousness technique he often uses in these quasi-autobiographical tales. Man, he's got wit for days. I laughed and had a good time while also raising my brows at his beautiful stretches of prose.
I listened to the Audible edition and he narrated it himself. I don't think anyone else could've done a better job. He's got VOICE, and I ain't talking about his tangible voice skills or the voices he gave the characters. He's got that oomph that you want from stories like these. His voice is important and more people need to hear it.
Learning about his backstory and the way in which he grew up made me want to meet Van Alst some day and hang. He seems like too cool a dude, and I can't wait to see what else he's got up his literary sleeve.
I listened to the Audible edition and he narrated it himself. I don't think anyone else could've done a better job. He's got VOICE, and I ain't talking about his tangible voice skills or the voices he gave the characters. He's got that oomph that you want from stories like these. His voice is important and more people need to hear it.
Learning about his backstory and the way in which he grew up made me want to meet Van Alst some day and hang. He seems like too cool a dude, and I can't wait to see what else he's got up his literary sleeve.
November 12, 2018
What a stellar read! This thing is raw, unflinching and feels a bit like getting hit over the head with a frying pan. What I love the most about Van Alst Jr's prose, is that it pulls you right into the world he's creating on the page. Like it or not, you're walking the trenches with him, seeing through his eyes, reacting to the world with his conscious. I've never read anything quite like it. Loved every single word.
Go read it. Immediately.
Go read it. Immediately.
March 30, 2022
A bold, voice-driven collection of interlinked stories told in the first person by Teddy, a young man growing up Indigenous on the mean streets of Chicago. By turns moving, bizarre, and uproariously funny, this is an important addition to the body of literature illuminating the experiences of the urban Indigenous in the U.S. The easiest comparator in terms of form and theme would be Tommy Orange’s There There, but don’t be fooled. Van Alst has a voice and a swagger all his own. Can’t recommend highly enough.
April 3, 2019
So good I had to read it twice.
There’s a bit of a literary cult personality around the heroic Chicago writers of yesteryear (Algren, Studs, and the like) that I haven’t able to muster the will to pierce through, what with them being dead white guys and also their Chicago having been gone for probably longer than it was ever around. Or at least it feels that way, trying to read “City on the Make” in 2019. Jeeeeeezus. Everyday is a Monday under the El, amirite??
Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s Chicago is also mostly gone and even more aggressively forgotten, thanks to the forces of gentrification that have successfully (and rapidly) turned huge portions of Chicago’s north side (namely the parks, Wicker, Humboldt, Rogers, etc) into a paradise of post collegiate millennials and ascendant middle class yuppies looking for the next great innovation in latte art while farming their culture out to so-called “sketchy” neighborhoods that put the “near” in Near West Side.
I would know: I am one.
Still, having arrived in the city only 5 years ago, something about Van Alst’s vision still feels present, even if it’s more like the ghost of the recently deceased hanging like morning mist in the sun. Or maybes it’s just the fucking cops, still busting the heads of black and brown kids for sport. Something’s never change, I guess. Anyway, this was the type of lit I dreamed about in my early, eager college years when I was thirsty (parched!) for the Real and the Authentic. Now I’m just relieved to read about America from the perspective of anyone not in the process of colonizing it. Pickings, like this volume, are slim but well worth the effort to track down.
There’s a bit of a literary cult personality around the heroic Chicago writers of yesteryear (Algren, Studs, and the like) that I haven’t able to muster the will to pierce through, what with them being dead white guys and also their Chicago having been gone for probably longer than it was ever around. Or at least it feels that way, trying to read “City on the Make” in 2019. Jeeeeeezus. Everyday is a Monday under the El, amirite??
Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s Chicago is also mostly gone and even more aggressively forgotten, thanks to the forces of gentrification that have successfully (and rapidly) turned huge portions of Chicago’s north side (namely the parks, Wicker, Humboldt, Rogers, etc) into a paradise of post collegiate millennials and ascendant middle class yuppies looking for the next great innovation in latte art while farming their culture out to so-called “sketchy” neighborhoods that put the “near” in Near West Side.
I would know: I am one.
Still, having arrived in the city only 5 years ago, something about Van Alst’s vision still feels present, even if it’s more like the ghost of the recently deceased hanging like morning mist in the sun. Or maybes it’s just the fucking cops, still busting the heads of black and brown kids for sport. Something’s never change, I guess. Anyway, this was the type of lit I dreamed about in my early, eager college years when I was thirsty (parched!) for the Real and the Authentic. Now I’m just relieved to read about America from the perspective of anyone not in the process of colonizing it. Pickings, like this volume, are slim but well worth the effort to track down.
January 4, 2023
I love this book for candor and emotional truth-telling about the squalid vulnerable relationships of brown, Indigenous, Black, and Irish gangbanger kids in Chicago, Potawatomi land, city that has become a home to many dispossessed and displaced peoples, fulcrum in the urban Indigenous movements and intelligentsia of Turtle Island. Much gang fiction glamorizes violence and the aggressive pan-capitalism of narco-trafficking but this one is more about the life circumstances that keep a young NDN up and moving when nothing much rolls in his favor. Gangsterism is a real problem on and off the rez in Indian Country, and not too many artists, scholars, and writers know how to talk about it in a way that doesn't pathologize or diminish people tied to that life. This collection is humanizing, funny, picaresque, dark, inspiring, and breathes like Thunderbird. Ometeotl, Theo Van Alst.
April 12, 2021
This was a wild ride. Part poetry, part fiction, part memoir, this look into Chicago gang life of the 1980s is fascinating. Despite the rough exterior, you are immediately endeared to Teddy, a Native gang member who kind of just finds himself involved in the life. Each chapter is a stand-alone story loosely woven together, as if you were sitting at a kitchen table late at night with Teddy, hearing about his escapades. We grow up with him, somewhere from 14 years old to his twenties. I especially loved the second to last story, where we see slices of Chicago you might otherwise not see. Although non-linear, I enjoyed this book and recommend if you are looking for something a little different.
January 2, 2019
A series of stories about coming of age as a young Indigenous youth in Chicago, the books is full of adventure, violence, friendships, and survival. This book was really good. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever read. The writing was brusque. It was honest. Sometimes it was brutal. It was often funny (laugh or cry funny - those cops) But there was a lot of warmth of remembrance there. I’ve never read happy stories of Chicago (I’m thinking of Samantha Irby here too), but people still write with such warmth about their struggles there. Contemporary, urban, coming of age in a hard world Indigenous lit. It’s 🔥. Check it out.
February 15, 2024
Not to be a hater, but I often find it easier to gather more specific thoughts when I feel that an author made some bad moves than when I feel like they changed my life. That said, I would not recommend this book. I don’t think I’ve been this disappointed by a book in a long time, if ever. I think my favorite part was honestly the (gorgeous) title itself, which kind of illustrates my main qualm, which is that I think Van Alst Jr. is far better suited for poetry than fiction. He definitely has a predilection for playing with sonics, but this technique was a little overactive for a novel, or perhaps just not executed well. This issue manifested in a number of ways, the most prominent being his inconsistent usage of vernacular language. This choice is one I find myself increasingly bothered by in fiction, not because I am opposed to vernacular usage—I think it’s really important to celebrate linguistic diversity and to write in a realistic voice that considers the cultural background of each character. However, the narrator’s multiplicity of inner voices seemed haphazard, rather than what could have been instead an intentional depiction of code switching and its impact on a character’s personality development or something. The lack of intentionality made the reappearance of vernacular usage after more formal sentences surprising and distracting as a reader. On a more simple level, it also just didn’t feel genuine to me. I wasn’t buying it as true to the character. Secondly, the plot development was totally convoluted. It’s very much a a road novel, but I found it really difficult to picture and remember where the characters are located at any given moment, mostly because there is just not sufficient world-building. Very action-heavy, lots of jargon and asides, not enough description of setting. It felt like reading a text from a friend trying to recount a story about something that happened to them on the street the other day. At one point Van Alst Jr. adds a touch I imagine is supposed to be a humorous rupture of the 4th wall or something: “…it’s not about that anyway, and right now, looking at this word count, we need to move things along” (125), which, personally, just felt like a cheap and totally unnecessary move. Overall, it was hard for me to get through despite its brevity.
February 25, 2020
The autobiographical essays in this volume depict life in Chicago for a Native boy who is a member of a gang and a keen observer of human relations, of power structures, and of the transformation available in the written word. Chicago is his rez, and he invites the reader to see that place and time, and learn beyond the stereotypes usually conjured by the terms "Native American" and "gangbanger."
Van Alst's writing makes you hear and see these characters and places, pushing past stereotypes and expectations. The places and people are evoked crisply, with a few perfect words or phrases, and there you are with them, seeing their human lives, understanding something new about how people navigate hardships.
The essays include moments of pain and violence, and passages that transcend the ugliness of some of the situations to show the reader beauty or profundity. But I must say: this book had me laughing out loud more than anything I've read in years.
Van Alst's writing makes you hear and see these characters and places, pushing past stereotypes and expectations. The places and people are evoked crisply, with a few perfect words or phrases, and there you are with them, seeing their human lives, understanding something new about how people navigate hardships.
The essays include moments of pain and violence, and passages that transcend the ugliness of some of the situations to show the reader beauty or profundity. But I must say: this book had me laughing out loud more than anything I've read in years.
April 5, 2022
Woowowowowowowowoowwow
It was a way of storytelling that immersed me into the pages from the first sentence and kept me enthralled throughout each chapter. The amount of characters as well as criss-crossing of storylines/story arches was incredible. It felt like the author knew the audience was intelligent and didn’t feel like everything needed to be explained which was refreshing and allowed a level of depth to be reached while reading.
One of my favorite lines: “you all have a secret now, you and the writer, and you cain’t never tell nobody. Like that. That’s the shit you want to have happen, the shit you wanted to talk about but never really could. You could get close. You could drink, and wanna open up, but usually you’d end up just punching the shit out of each other, ‘cause that’s how that shit works.” (Van Alst Jr., pg. 48)
It was a way of storytelling that immersed me into the pages from the first sentence and kept me enthralled throughout each chapter. The amount of characters as well as criss-crossing of storylines/story arches was incredible. It felt like the author knew the audience was intelligent and didn’t feel like everything needed to be explained which was refreshing and allowed a level of depth to be reached while reading.
One of my favorite lines: “you all have a secret now, you and the writer, and you cain’t never tell nobody. Like that. That’s the shit you want to have happen, the shit you wanted to talk about but never really could. You could get close. You could drink, and wanna open up, but usually you’d end up just punching the shit out of each other, ‘cause that’s how that shit works.” (Van Alst Jr., pg. 48)
September 13, 2025
This book is a memoir about the author's youth, although chapters will jump around between time periods in his life. The writing is very stream of consciousness, and there is no clear plot line. Each chapter is more like a vignette.Van Alst Jr. grew up in Chicago in the late 80s and early 90s and was immersed in gang culture. Van Alst is also Native and an intellectual, and so one of the most interesting parts of the book was seeing how these other identities influenced him over time. Although raw, gritty, and fueled with drug use and violence, this is not a nihilistic or overly depressing read and has a lot of humor and cultural insight from a perspective I haven't thought about much. This work reminds me of Drown by Junot Diaz, but to be fair, it has been over 10 years since I read that one.
November 2, 2023
Well, this was an adventure. The escapades of youth with the backdrop of racism and social dysfunction. Kind of hilarious in parts, and I loved that it was narrated by the author, but ... I dunno, it was a slice of life, and kind of a nasty life. Things that were meant to be funny just ... I can understand how they'd be funny in retrospect, if these people were characters, but assuming this was all true ... a lot of it rubbed me the wrong way. Women of course get the "ugly" nickname (I bet there were a lot of ugly dudes, too, but you know how it is), bus drivers get harassed, drug shenanigans ... I find myself grappling with appreciation of these truths and the ick factor undergirding them.
November 19, 2021
Sacred Smokesgh and gritty...the way it must feel to be a young Native American youth growing up - not i the oving arms of his extended family on the Rez, but on the mean streets of Cbhicago, shuttled back and forth between his parents. This is another insight into the live of Urban Indians, an all-too-often overlooked abnd forgotten subculture.
January 28, 2023
Very hard to rate. An original voice and occasionally had me grinning in sheer delight. Being from Chicago I loved all the accurate North Side details. At the same time, it took me months to finish this slim volume. I had some trouble with the Beat writing style and it felt a little weird to be trapped in the head of the narrator.
March 15, 2024
This was a super interesting book. Its gritty, poetic style isn't my favorite type of reading, and I found myself wishing I could connect more with the narrator. But it's been a while since I've read something with such a strong VOICE, and I really appreciated getting glimpses into this writer's world.
May 15, 2019
Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. grabs you by the hair and drags you through the light and dark of growing up in gang culture in Chicago. All the while talking, telling one story after another. It's a wild ride, with writing that's both raw and beautiful.
September 9, 2019
I liked this book. There were times when the narrative voice made it difficult for me to follow the story, and for long stretches of time. But the story was interesting and kept me engaged, overall. I would read more of Van Alst's work.
March 2, 2024
I tried to get through this, but I could not. The lack of quotation marks to mark when someone was speaking and the way some of these stories were published it looked more like poetry than fiction. I'm not a poetry reader, not my cup of tea and it took away from my focus on the story.
February 7, 2025
3.75 stars
I really liked this book. It was not written the traditional way and is instead a collection of short anecdotes. It was unique and the story was engaging for the most part. There were a couple of stories I could have done without, but overall I enjoyed.
I really liked this book. It was not written the traditional way and is instead a collection of short anecdotes. It was unique and the story was engaging for the most part. There were a couple of stories I could have done without, but overall I enjoyed.
April 22, 2022
not very memorable but the cover is cool
April 26, 2022
It took a few pages for me to get into the author’s style of writing, but I was soon hooked. There are a few digressions, here and there, but they are necessary for the ride. Some funny shit.
June 14, 2022
DNF.....the writing was difficult to follow the story.
November 17, 2022
3.5 rating! This was a very solid read but once again, short stories are not my jam.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 35 reviews