A Drunken Heap of Trouble Every Week: The First Three Books

by Brian Alan Ellis, Ben Tanzer (Preface), Gabino Iglesias (Introduction)

Compiling two critically acclaimed novellas, 33 Fragments of Sick-Sad Living and King Shit (with illustrator Waylon Thornton), and an equally lauded short-story collection, The Mustache He’s Always Wanted but Could Never Grow, A Drunken Heap of Trouble Every Week shows you—“…with a violent, sex-crazed lowbrow majesty...”—just why Brian Alan Ellis has been called “a master of the short, sharp prose from the gutter,” with a special preface by Ben Tanzer, as well as introductions by Gabino Iglesias, Bud Smith, and Brian Alan Ellis himself!

240 pages, Paperback

Published December 31, 2018

About the author

BRIAN ALAN ELLIS runs House of Vlad Press, and is the author of several books, including Sad Laughter (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018). His writing has appeared at Juked, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Fanzine, Electric Literature, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Funhouse, Heavy Feather Review, and Queen Mob’s Tea House, among other places. He lives in Florida, and tweets sad and clever things at both @brianalanellis and @HouseofVlad.

Reviews

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am, admittedly, very late to the Brian Alan Ellis party. But fortunately for me, it feels like the kind of party where showing up late is approved of - if not outright expected - and the fact that everyone is already three drinks in when I arrive just makes them that much happier to see me. The kind of party thrown by a 40-something in an apartment complex full of 20-somethings, where liquor flows straight from plastic bottles to plastic cups, and there's a cement slab out back that everyone refers to as "the smoking porch." The kind of party that spills out to the street, and down to the bars, and back to the street at last call, and then maybe finally lands somewhere - housing scrambled eggs at an all-night diner, or huffing paint thinner under a bridge, or maybe just passed out on a park bench or something - but doesn't ever quite die down enough for anyone to want to go home. The kind of party where going home, more often than not, is the absolute worst, last option. So "late" is kind of relative. In the bloodshot eye of the beholder.

In A Drunken Heap of Trouble Every Week, which sandwiches the novellas 33 Fragments of Sick-Sad Living and King Shit around the short story collection The Mustache He's Always Wanted but Could Never Grow, Brian Alan Ellis introduces his one-of-a-kind voice over and over and over again via the fragmentary, likely slurred stories of folks who never quite left the party; folks whose lives, through little fault of their own, stayed the kind of lives that most people aspire to escape. They work dead end jobs in dead end towns full of other dead end folks, and through the straightforward, often heartbreakingly sincere manner in which he relays their circumstances, Ellis masterfully weaves together a tattered, vomit-stained tapestry of the 21st century down-and-out.

The real trick comes, however, in the decency with which he treats his beloved stratum of degenerates. Whether they're confessing to sleazy crimes, surrendering to sordid temptations, overcoming profound loneliness, or just punching the clock somewhere miserable and low, there is a tenderness to these stories (well, most of them anyway) that sets Ellis apart from almost any comparable writer of similar fare. Imagine, I guess, if Bukowski was likable; if he somehow made you want to root for him a little. Or if Hubert Selby could just relax and enjoy the ride for once instead of sending everybody straight to the 10th circle of Hell. Wouldn't that be nice? To just have a rough night and sleep it off and wake up next to a stranger and not totally remember the whys or what fors in between, but also not really care? That's what reading these stories is like. These characters aren't cautionary tales. Their bad decisions aren't the end of the world. They're just what happens at the end of another long, disappointing week. And then they have more weeks just like them. And it's mostly fine. In telling these stories in this way, Ellis has done a notoriously self-serious genre a great service. He's given gutter pulp a heart. It's a Hell of a party to be late to.

[Michael]

My first time (but not last time) reading Brian Alan Ellis. Knee jerk reaction is to compare him to Bukowski but instead of celebrating the shitheads like they’re people you should wrap a halo around, Ellis gives an honest portrayal of those same shitheads and let’s you make up your own mind about them. Maybe were all shitheads in our own way. At least that’s what I got out of it.