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Especially the Bad Things
Can a relationship survive on one person's love for a beard? Can Shakespeare protect a doomed romance from an angry bee stuck in a car? How does an old iron speak to affairs of the heart? And how can we gauge the secret yearnings of the woman who writes novels about werewolves? Wry and absurd, pithy and profound, the short fiction of Greg Gerke takes the pulse of couples arriving at the end of something, lovers entering the "unendurable zone." Moments of improbable grace are salvaged from bitter break-ups, prolonged languor is punctuated by bursts of panic and violence, and the acute pain of thwarted hopes dissipates into indifference. In each of these forty stories, Gerke diagnoses the poisons of heartache with results that pull in two directions at once: comical and grotesque, caustic and humane, sharp-tongued and stirringly sincere.
150 pages, Paperback
Published September 16, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 14, 2020
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/es...
...in the end life is serious and death more so—that’s why he favors poetry, because it’s august and melancholic and people go Mmmmm after he or someone else reads a good one…
Not much of a fiction lover these days but Greg Gerke managed to keep me reading in this engaging collection of short stories. He writes of things I often think of, considerations routinely made, and feelings we now both share for the people of this world. Not to mention the many questions often asked. Poetry and writing are two relevant examples Gerke considers, as well as delving into numerous social studies which are of great interest to me.
In a story situated near the end of the book, and titled She Told the Man, the Man Told Me, Gerke got me good. My wife and I have suffered through several encounters at hospital emergency rooms and also impossibly agonizing periods waiting to get an appointment to see a specialist as if nothing could ever be the matter. Like in, What’s the rush?
...It started when she was hit by a car—luckily, a glancing blow...She went to the hospital, but they told her she was fine...This woman went home and called her sister. As she told her sister about the accident, the woman fell down the steps of her duplex...The woman went back to the hospital. Everything is hurting, she told them. Everything about me hurts. They examined her and told her it wasn’t that bad and she probably hadn’t needed to come to the hospital. Since her doctor was closed on Sundays, they could understand how she wanted to come to them, even though some people in her situation might not have bothered…
Emergency rooms only stabilize the suffering patient enough to send her home. They tell her to see a specialist who cannot help her if her ailment does not involve something the doctor has studied and knows something about. There is very little creativity in the current medical community and seemingly no interest in figuring out what is wrong with their patients. Gerke did a fine job of kindly bringing that terror back home to me.
...Nietzsche once groused, If you aren’t attracted to someone’s deficiencies during the courting phase of a relationship, a proper base for the future would be lacking…
The last story in this collection titled Descant could very well be my favorite. Gerke studies relationships, seriously, those seen and those felt. But he has yet to spend thirty-six years like I have with a wife he claims in his essays could be a person he goes the distance with. But I think the odds are pretty good based on the constructions of his fictions. A couple days ago I read in the Detroit Free Press that the new head football coach for Michigan State asked his wife to marry him on their very first date. I could have done the same because I knew and my guts told me so, but I was so afraid of making a wrong step with her and consequently being rejected. So I opted for perfect behavior from the get go, never making untoward advances and definitely not creeping her out with a marriage proposal offered at the age of seventeen. But today, almost fifty years later she tells me that was a mistake. That I should have told her I loved her, even asking her to marry me. And because I didn’t it took another twelve years and a mountain of pain before we found each other again.
Greg Gerke helps me remember my life, and that is no small measure of his talent. He also encourages me to consider, and reconsider, ideas and beliefs. He challenges what appears normal. The gifted writer Gary Lutz claims he reads Gerke’s book often, returning to its graces, marveling at its constructions. I might do the same.
...in the end life is serious and death more so—that’s why he favors poetry, because it’s august and melancholic and people go Mmmmm after he or someone else reads a good one…
Not much of a fiction lover these days but Greg Gerke managed to keep me reading in this engaging collection of short stories. He writes of things I often think of, considerations routinely made, and feelings we now both share for the people of this world. Not to mention the many questions often asked. Poetry and writing are two relevant examples Gerke considers, as well as delving into numerous social studies which are of great interest to me.
In a story situated near the end of the book, and titled She Told the Man, the Man Told Me, Gerke got me good. My wife and I have suffered through several encounters at hospital emergency rooms and also impossibly agonizing periods waiting to get an appointment to see a specialist as if nothing could ever be the matter. Like in, What’s the rush?
...It started when she was hit by a car—luckily, a glancing blow...She went to the hospital, but they told her she was fine...This woman went home and called her sister. As she told her sister about the accident, the woman fell down the steps of her duplex...The woman went back to the hospital. Everything is hurting, she told them. Everything about me hurts. They examined her and told her it wasn’t that bad and she probably hadn’t needed to come to the hospital. Since her doctor was closed on Sundays, they could understand how she wanted to come to them, even though some people in her situation might not have bothered…
Emergency rooms only stabilize the suffering patient enough to send her home. They tell her to see a specialist who cannot help her if her ailment does not involve something the doctor has studied and knows something about. There is very little creativity in the current medical community and seemingly no interest in figuring out what is wrong with their patients. Gerke did a fine job of kindly bringing that terror back home to me.
...Nietzsche once groused, If you aren’t attracted to someone’s deficiencies during the courting phase of a relationship, a proper base for the future would be lacking…
The last story in this collection titled Descant could very well be my favorite. Gerke studies relationships, seriously, those seen and those felt. But he has yet to spend thirty-six years like I have with a wife he claims in his essays could be a person he goes the distance with. But I think the odds are pretty good based on the constructions of his fictions. A couple days ago I read in the Detroit Free Press that the new head football coach for Michigan State asked his wife to marry him on their very first date. I could have done the same because I knew and my guts told me so, but I was so afraid of making a wrong step with her and consequently being rejected. So I opted for perfect behavior from the get go, never making untoward advances and definitely not creeping her out with a marriage proposal offered at the age of seventeen. But today, almost fifty years later she tells me that was a mistake. That I should have told her I loved her, even asking her to marry me. And because I didn’t it took another twelve years and a mountain of pain before we found each other again.
Greg Gerke helps me remember my life, and that is no small measure of his talent. He also encourages me to consider, and reconsider, ideas and beliefs. He challenges what appears normal. The gifted writer Gary Lutz claims he reads Gerke’s book often, returning to its graces, marveling at its constructions. I might do the same.
April 3, 2025
I have loved every single story so far. The sentences cast the reader in all sorts of potential tunnels before they terminate. I’d even bump this another star for his use of Fuckface as a sub the latest of all social media suckholes.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews