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Pathologies
17 very short stories by the author of Without Wax and Questionstruck and Ampersand, Mass. If you like these stories, check out Ampersand, Mass., a full-length collection of short stories by William Walsh.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
76 pages, Paperback
First published April 6, 2010
6 people are currently reading
38 people want to read
About the author
William Walsh
99 books71 followersWilliam Walsh is the author of The Poems and The Poets (both from Erratum Press), Forty-five American Boys (Outpost19), ON TV, Unknown Arts, Ampersand, Mass., Pathologies, Questionstruck, Stephen King Stephen King (all from Keyhole Press), and Without Wax: A Documentary Novel (Casperian Books).
His work has appeared in Annalemma, Artifice, Quick Fiction,, New York Tyrant, Caketrain, Juked, LIT, Rosebud, Quarterly West, Crescent Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as well as anthologies like The &NOW Anthology: Best of Innovative Writing, Dzanc's Best of the Web, and New Micro: Norton Anthology of Exceptionally Short Fiction.
His work has appeared in Annalemma, Artifice, Quick Fiction,, New York Tyrant, Caketrain, Juked, LIT, Rosebud, Quarterly West, Crescent Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as well as anthologies like The &NOW Anthology: Best of Innovative Writing, Dzanc's Best of the Web, and New Micro: Norton Anthology of Exceptionally Short Fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
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May 10, 2024The William Walsh does humor, pop culture and sex as well as anyone in this collection, but one thing I'm always struck by regardless of what I'm reading of his, is Walsh's almost restless curiosity, which always pops off the page, all fertile, authentic and vibrant.
June 30, 2010
Over and over while reading Pathologies I had the same reaction. I read a story and thought, "Ha ha, that's funny," and felt like I'd got the point. Then I finished the story and thought, "Hang on, that's more than just funny...," and reread it to enjoy the many layers Walsh packs into each very short piece. These stories read quickly, giving the illusion of easy understanding, but they become more complex and subtle as you read. Most are pared-down portraits of characters, honing in on their strangest quirks not to reduce them to laughingstocks but to make them more nuanced than those quirks at first seem to allow. I was reminded of Gary Lutz' fiction in how powerfully they get to the heart of a character, and have a "simple" surface that belies the complexity beneath. But rather than the skewed syntax of Lutz, the stories in Pathologies accomplish this by offering precisely the right detail at precisely the right time.
March 30, 2012
I read this book to satisfy Keyhole's requirements for submission, but I'm glad I did. Pathologies is experimental in all senses of the word...it is a beautiful muddle between poetry and prose with surprising subject matters and extremely quirky characters. At times it was sad, but that was always tempered with wit and humor.
August 21, 2013
Keyhole Press brings out another book marked by eccentricity, but not doomed for greatness. In this collection of short stories, William Walsh walks a tightrope with his tongue stuck so deeply in his cheek, you wonder that the weight to that side doesn't tumble him right off. You get the feeling that Walsh wants to be an erudite master of funny, but ends up one of the comics that will always open for the really funny guy.
To be fair, some of his concepts are unique and beyond the post-modern schtick. A monologue from a snowman on the moon? A scoliosis fetishist? I loved Revision, where he twists the sensations of drowning around and around, ending in a surreal description of the rescuer. You Can Live On Lemons works beautifully as an ironic charming vignette, and Governor Ghandi has a great premise – Ghandi morphs into Donald Trump. This Laptop Kills Fascists, Beggars Can't, Markson Mails It In, and Bunny are self indulgent collections of lists – you suspect they started as writing exercises to break writer's block.
Switch is the redeeming story. Here in a set of coupled flashes saturated with an atmosphere of barbiturate haze angst, we get a full character development and a person that we care about – Walsh overcomes my principle objections to short-short fiction. And finally, the last words of the collection let us know he can really really write. “I don't know. I want so much.”
To be fair, some of his concepts are unique and beyond the post-modern schtick. A monologue from a snowman on the moon? A scoliosis fetishist? I loved Revision, where he twists the sensations of drowning around and around, ending in a surreal description of the rescuer. You Can Live On Lemons works beautifully as an ironic charming vignette, and Governor Ghandi has a great premise – Ghandi morphs into Donald Trump. This Laptop Kills Fascists, Beggars Can't, Markson Mails It In, and Bunny are self indulgent collections of lists – you suspect they started as writing exercises to break writer's block.
Switch is the redeeming story. Here in a set of coupled flashes saturated with an atmosphere of barbiturate haze angst, we get a full character development and a person that we care about – Walsh overcomes my principle objections to short-short fiction. And finally, the last words of the collection let us know he can really really write. “I don't know. I want so much.”
February 11, 2012
I have to admit, I really enjoyed this one. Some of the stories were a bit too self-consciously clever for my taste, but that doesn't change the fact that they were clever, and a few of them were quite poignant as well. Bonus points for being a free download from Keyhole Press, and for being the first book I've read on my phone.
May 31, 2010
William Walsh's Pathologies has introduced me to yet another terrific practitioner of the wry and ironic brand of flash fiction. This is a consistently inventive and witty collection which ended all too soon. Walsh and the folks at Keyhole Press have a real winner here.
May 15, 2017
A good use of some flash fiction, but nothing riveting or mind-blowing. Just professional, and sometimes not great. The more artifact-like and experimental ones especially missed their marks. My favorite stories were "Switch" and "Footboy."
PS: thanks for making this a free download, Keyhole Press. However, if you're gonna show some press pride through a sample book, why this one? Character's names are misspelled. That doesn't leave a great impression on me.
PS: thanks for making this a free download, Keyhole Press. However, if you're gonna show some press pride through a sample book, why this one? Character's names are misspelled. That doesn't leave a great impression on me.
October 7, 2020
Forty-six pages of short stories. None of them very good.
June 8, 2015
If laughter is good medicine, William Walsh presents sick remedy in Pathologies.
His short collection of diseased proceedings is more than the sum of its madness. Walsh is a gifted writer, by turns astounding with sharp phrases and surprising with brief, unpredictable arcs. One way to treat this is by engaging the peculiar brilliance of individual stories; another, by revealing the choicest lines:
Emily Dickinson loved the smell of mothballs but she had trouble holding their wings.
Margaret Atwood had been arrested before. But he had never
been arrested by a police officer named Margaret Atwood.
I grow a mustache, and it looks like I left my zipper open.
“Footboy” opens the collection showing us just how ordinary the extraordinary can be, with a protagonist who chooses to do everything by foot instead of by hand. Peel an orange? Check. Tie shoes? Check. Open a milk carton? You’ll have to read and see for yourself.
Check the brothers Barthelme in “The Wrong Barthelme”. These boys give us more of what can be strange in the ordinary. They play with electric trains in their basement until their squabbling attracts the attention of mom, who brings down three typewriters and a ream of paper. In orderly fashion each receives a typewriter, gives their mother a peck on the cheek, and takes a seat at “their stations” in the row of leather swivel chairs at the ping-pong table. Still, someone’s got to pay for the chucking and damaging of trains: “Frederick must sit on his hands in front of his paper-loaded typewriter while Don B. and the other one tap away”. Unusual punishment, the more absurd for occurring in the midst of such order.
Walsh turns from boyhood delight to banana republic in “You Can Live on Lemons”, a witty entertainer playing for the tourist set—small club, late night singer/joke-maker backed by a twelve-piece band, thin-skinned generalissimo with deep acne scars—plies soft barbs against the leadership and bites lemons, reality’s bitter flag.
So much diversity to Walsh’s ink. And there’s more.
A twisted turn awaits in “Revision” after the narrator is pulled from the roiling waters at the nexus of two rivers. Dark chuckles as mom and sis add their views on rehabilitating a criminal in “The Terms of My Parole”. In “Untitled”, the protagonist’s erotic imprinting leaves Bert with a sad fetish and a hole in the bus to satisfy it. Walsh gives us a baby named Beef and a cape-wearing pacifist reborn to as a master marketer. “The Margaret Atwoods” is a brilliant little comedy about—not two but three men—named Margaret Atwood. “A Courtship Ballad” has a lot more going on underneath its sweater than a decent old-fashioned story ought to.
I could go on. These stories, each short and sweet (between 500 and 2,000 words) are a form of madness and mayhem, but above all they are fun, the natively bizarre moving to places ever more bizarre. Take “Diagnosis: Mustache”, in which an answering machine message remonstrates some lady hassling Dick Van Dyke over his late-career mustache. Later, we have a narrator in the form of a snowman on the moon.
“Switch”, my favorite, so much more than just the left thumb in one hole and the right in another. “Switch” has everything. So does this collection. Did I mention it will cost you nothing?
His short collection of diseased proceedings is more than the sum of its madness. Walsh is a gifted writer, by turns astounding with sharp phrases and surprising with brief, unpredictable arcs. One way to treat this is by engaging the peculiar brilliance of individual stories; another, by revealing the choicest lines:
Emily Dickinson loved the smell of mothballs but she had trouble holding their wings.
Margaret Atwood had been arrested before. But he had never
been arrested by a police officer named Margaret Atwood.
I grow a mustache, and it looks like I left my zipper open.
“Footboy” opens the collection showing us just how ordinary the extraordinary can be, with a protagonist who chooses to do everything by foot instead of by hand. Peel an orange? Check. Tie shoes? Check. Open a milk carton? You’ll have to read and see for yourself.
Check the brothers Barthelme in “The Wrong Barthelme”. These boys give us more of what can be strange in the ordinary. They play with electric trains in their basement until their squabbling attracts the attention of mom, who brings down three typewriters and a ream of paper. In orderly fashion each receives a typewriter, gives their mother a peck on the cheek, and takes a seat at “their stations” in the row of leather swivel chairs at the ping-pong table. Still, someone’s got to pay for the chucking and damaging of trains: “Frederick must sit on his hands in front of his paper-loaded typewriter while Don B. and the other one tap away”. Unusual punishment, the more absurd for occurring in the midst of such order.
Walsh turns from boyhood delight to banana republic in “You Can Live on Lemons”, a witty entertainer playing for the tourist set—small club, late night singer/joke-maker backed by a twelve-piece band, thin-skinned generalissimo with deep acne scars—plies soft barbs against the leadership and bites lemons, reality’s bitter flag.
So much diversity to Walsh’s ink. And there’s more.
A twisted turn awaits in “Revision” after the narrator is pulled from the roiling waters at the nexus of two rivers. Dark chuckles as mom and sis add their views on rehabilitating a criminal in “The Terms of My Parole”. In “Untitled”, the protagonist’s erotic imprinting leaves Bert with a sad fetish and a hole in the bus to satisfy it. Walsh gives us a baby named Beef and a cape-wearing pacifist reborn to as a master marketer. “The Margaret Atwoods” is a brilliant little comedy about—not two but three men—named Margaret Atwood. “A Courtship Ballad” has a lot more going on underneath its sweater than a decent old-fashioned story ought to.
I could go on. These stories, each short and sweet (between 500 and 2,000 words) are a form of madness and mayhem, but above all they are fun, the natively bizarre moving to places ever more bizarre. Take “Diagnosis: Mustache”, in which an answering machine message remonstrates some lady hassling Dick Van Dyke over his late-career mustache. Later, we have a narrator in the form of a snowman on the moon.
“Switch”, my favorite, so much more than just the left thumb in one hole and the right in another. “Switch” has everything. So does this collection. Did I mention it will cost you nothing?
March 21, 2013
At first I was not a fan of this collection of short stories. I'm not sure which story did it for me, but at some point I started imagining Jack Kerouac reading them in that tone of voice and that cadence only he had. Changed everything for me. I would say that if you like Vonnegut or Kerouac, you might like this one. It's gritty but not in a painful way. There's a kind of grace to how Walsh handles the grit. Lots of repetition. so if you can't read that particular device, you won't like this book.
July 29, 2015
I mean, it was worth the free Kindle download. I do appreciate that flash fiction is hard as all-get-out to write. I enjoyed a few stories but overall the collection was just okay for me. Such is the joy of short stories I guess, some hit home and others don’t. I found A Courtship Ballad to be the most humorous but I also enjoyed Footboy, The Terms of My Parole, and Switch. (That second-person narration in Switch was very Calvino’s If on a Winter's Night a Traveler to me)
July 30, 2013
I confess, I didn't really read the ENTIRE thing because, after awhile, I just thought there are so many better books out there to read and learn from so why waste my time? I appreciate the inventiveness it takes to create a story like "Footboy" but whoever decided to publish this book clearly doesn't know the difference between "just plain weird" and "actual talent." "Switch" would have been good, too, if it weren't narrated in second person...seriously, why is that a thing now?
November 8, 2016
At various times I had mixed feelings about the short stories in this book. Frequently, especially early on, I thought the author was in love with his clever word play, but didn't really know where his stories were going or what their purpose was. But on the whole, it was enjoyable reading. Very imaginative. Not particularly moving but some fun ideas to think about.
January 19, 2012
I thought this was the worst book ever written, a complete waste of time and energy both on the writers part and on mine for wasting a few hours of reading time.
January 3, 2015
Many stories were repetitive, and I didn't "get" them, but the book was free, and there was a lovely little piece about Dick Van Dyke's mustache.
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