A collection of short stories from David Bernstein. Here we go:

 

The Trojan Plushy -

 

Another revenge tale that combines the werewolf with witchcraft and the Trojan Horse. Has a Twilight Zone-kind of feel.

 

4 out of 5 stars

 

 

The Booglin -

 

You'll think twice the next time you have a booger stuck and it won't come out. Fun, silly story.

 

4 out of 5 stars

 

 

Eaten Un-Alive -

 

Life isn't easy when you're a vampire in a zombie apocalypse.

 

4 1/2 out of 5 stars

 

It's Nice Not To Have To Share -

 

Georgia shares everything with her sister Gerri, but some things she wants to keep to herself.

 

3 out of 5 stars

 

Invasion -

 

Aliens plan to overtake earth by imitating a cockroach and using the neighborhood adolescent psycho.

 

4 out of 5 stars

 

 

Samurai Zombie Killer -

 

A zombie contagion in the water supply of the local samurai warrior.

 

3 out of 5 stars

 

 

Small Town, Big Trouble -

 

The werewolf legend to help explain Sasquatch. I love it.

 

5 out of 5 stars

 

 

Bad Cutlery -

 

When good knives go bad. A fun possessed object story.

 

4 1/2 out of 5 stars

 

Potty Mouth -

 

This is one messed up story! I won't even try to explain it. It's simply something you'll have to experience for yourself. Kudos to Bernstein for probably the most far out there original tale I have ever read! You need professional help, sir!

 

5 out of 5 stars

 

 

STD -

 

If you weren't convinced to practice safe sex before, you will be by the time you finish this story.

 

5 out of 5 stars

 

All in all, a nice collection of macabre tales. There were only a couple that didn't do it for me. The rest were fun and there were even some that I have to question Bernstein's sanity or blood alcohol level. Good stuff.

 

 

Overall:

 

4 1/2 Bags of Blood out of 5

 

You can also follow my reviews at the following links:

 

https://kenmckinley.wordpress.com

 

http://intothemacabre.booklikes.com

 

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5919799-ken-mckinley

 

The Trojan Plushy - Beware of where you buy your children's toys.

Book 1, in the Cape Town series

 

This fantastic story almost impossible to put down recounts how, why and what happened to Jack Burns, an American who relocated to Cape Town, South Africa with his family.

 

 

Blackmailed into participating in a bank heist that went terribly wrong in his home town of Milwaukee Jack realizes he needs to get out of town and go into hiding with his wife and son. At first everything seems to be going well, then one evening all hell breaks loose when Jack is forced to defend his home and family, his killer instincts kick in with his wife and son as witnesses.

 

From this point on Jack's life spirals out of control, this drastic act of self defense leaves him alone unable to go to the police because of his international fugitive status and targeted by street gangs who want revenge and a rogue cop who has his own agenda and is insanely corrupt. All this only scratches the surface of what life has in store for Jack and his family, there is no shortage of suspense and drama from one end to the other. There is little time to catch a breath between chapters. This fast paced action packed plot is a continual barrage of events that just keep on coming. This solid thriller is definitely plot driven and provides an intense sense of place and excellent characterization. It also has a witty side while it explores Paradise Park and Cape Town and brings everything to life through the twists and turns of the criminal world and the confusing racial identity.

 

 

 

I read both of Smith's first two novels (including #2 Wake Up Dead) in one fell swoop, part of a larger project I'm fiddling around, trying to see if/how it might develop. (If you're interested...I'm interested in the explosion of South African crime fiction since '94... what, how, why, who. Other than having an assumption that pop culture embodies and enacts a complex and intriguing approach to social issues, cultural values and beliefs, and the knotted tangle of who "we" are -- I haven't any predetermined theses. And I'm a fan of crime fiction.) But I'm not going to spend a ton of time boring you with a tedious "real-time" performance of how the project evolves. Instead, a quick "review" here and then a couple of open issues (that I'll address on the other's review and) that Smith's two novels provoked me to consider.

So, do they work as crime fiction? Yes, undoubtedly. But I almost read on a bell curve. At first, Mixed Blood's outsized grotesqueries seemed cartoonish, in the bad way. A bad cop isn't just corrupt--Smith returns again and again to his sweating flaps of flesh, his hemorrhoidal pain, his flatulence. I mean again, and again. The prose is all staccato emphatics, and the characters are all exclamation points -- the literary equivalent of ALL CAPS. But as this first novel wore on, the sheer cussed pervasiveness of these exaggerated perversities began to hit home, to shape an Ellroy-like (Ellrovian?) worldview that was bleak, unsettling, provocative--and not simply 2-d shenanigans. Every secondary, even tertiary character gets the treatment, and the book becomes an expressionistic collage of the worst visions of human behavior. The second novel opens with a whiz-bang viciousness that's similarly well-drawn, the protagonist there sitting down to dinner with a "cannibal" and a "whore." Yet by the middle of that novel, the chiaroscoro began to return to crude black and white, at least for this reader. Without spoiling anything, the author seemed to rely on too easy a set of shortcuts and stock types, and the book's second half seemed more a ready-made drag to me. Drag is perhaps overstating it -- you rush along, but. . .

. . . it's also tied to a similar problem arc, over the two novels, in plotting. In the first half of Mixed, Smith starts with a couple of cool kicks to the solar plexus but then spends a lot of time wandering through his gallery of grotesques, but (like the best of Elmore Leonard) he keeps throwing balls in the air, and by the end he's got a whole constellation of interconnected shit flying around. I started Wake with heightened expectations, but... as one character notes late in the second novel, a sudden collision of a couple of subplots and personalities could be coincidence, or it could be destiny, and she opts to read events as destiny. I am afraid it seemed increasingly like the cartoon happenstances familiar to overdetermined noir. (I don't want to spoil anything, but a repeatedly noted "extra" is so portentously noted, again and again and again, that when the character emerges more forcefully to put the bow on another subplot, and conveniently collide with two other subplots, I was rather annoyed.)

Smith's got loads of talent, and these will both please more hardcore fans of the genre, looking for some of these kicks. But I namechecked Ellroy and Leonard, and Smith's got neither the brutal existential heft of the former nor the well-honed attention to character of the latter... yet. He's worth paying attention to...

Review to come.