Reviewed
by: Sam Waite
Genre:
Short Story Anthology
Approximate
word count: 40-45,000
words
Availability
Click
on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, or Smashwords store
Author:
Various authors.
Description:
You’re
sitting at a bar enjoying a baseball game on TV, when a stranger
begins talking about a major leaguer who once played in Taiwan. You’d
rather just watch, but he keeps talking and draws you in. The story
takes a twist. You miss a double play. The guy says he’ll shut up,
but he’s talking about a famous batter. You urge him to continue.
He does and you learn how the player turned his career and his life
around after a rainy night in Taiwan.
Roger
Jergenson’s Flyout
leads a collection of short stories told by expatriates in a land
that is as far removed culturally as it is physically from their
birth places. While the vignettes, from fantasy to noir, are written
as insights into Taiwan’s multi-layered culture, they are as much
about the universal human condition as they are about the
differences.
Appraisal:
Whoever
compiled the anthology did well to start with Patrick Wayland’s
baseball story. It is finely crafted and leaves the reader with a
satisfying O. Henry ending.
In Gap
Years, by Tony Messina,
the male half of a cohabitating couple struggles against the
claustrophobic malaise of a deteriorating relationship. He seeks
solace through food, TV, and an affair as he looks into a future he
can neither accept nor easily escape. The story is told with stark
imagery that includes a chess game wherein the hero blunders into a
trap and is check mated by his partner’s queen.
Superstition,
by Amanda Miao, is a cautionary tale that unbelief is an inadequate
shield against things unseen. The story is told with touches of humor
and marred only by an abundance of modifiers. “… she quickly
snatched an apple …” and later dropped it into her “large
purse.” Things too often are not simply done. They are done “with
a thud” or “with disapproval” when either it doesn’t matter
or the context makes the “how” redundant.
The
Collector, by J.J. Green,
is a failed dystopian tale of society after global warming debased
civilization. A shopkeeper sells photos of times before the Peak Heat
and gadgets that people have forgotten how to use. He is taken by a
policewoman and forced to work on a government project that uses
“deep brain reading” to extract memories from the elderly. That
exotic technology is in use, while the purpose of a tennis racket has
been forgotten, apparently within the life span of surviving humans.
Not only is the internal logic flawed, the tale ends with an event
that owes solely to happenstance. A busy reader might skip this one.
In
the Mood, by CK Hugo
Chung, sneaks up on you like an unwanted stray kitten that quickly
steals your heart. Military men in combat gear train in dragon-fire
heat. Cut to a soldier on his bunk dreaming of cooling “the
delicate face” of one he loves but fears to approach. Cut to that
person, another soldier. The story focuses on the emotional tension
of homosexual attraction in a macho society. For the most part, the
writing is elegant, but would be much improved by a drill sergeant
editor demanding rewrites of clichés, “I took it, all of it, with
a grain of salt” and indulgences of excess, “The breeze was salty
and sultry. The sun slow-cooked the air with a comfortable amount of
heat and humidity.” Literacy here was sacrificed to alliteration,
as sultry cannot reconcile with comfortable humidity.
Dragon’s
Call, by L.L. Phelps, is
a fun fantasy about a young woman who finds she can’t run far
enough to take a break from her very special calling.
In
Bitter Pill,
Katrina A. Brown, takes a cue from The
Twilight Zone with a
deliciously evil twist that would have been tastier if someone had
given the story a careful read before publishing. The 2011 Fukushima
disaster is referred to three times: once correctly, once as the 2012
Fukishima Disaster and once as the 2011 Fukishima Disaster.
We’ll
See Each Other on Facebook,
by Edward Cheung, is a moderately engaging story of wasting time in a
foreign land and reaching for elusive treasures of purpose and love.
Unfortunately, quality of writing is also elusive in this story as
only partially described below under Format/Typo Issues.
FYI:
The
reviewer is a 30-year resident of Japan and spent six months in
Taiwan as a university student studying political science and
Mandarin at Shida, during the fascist rule of Chiang Kai-shek.
Format/Typo
Issues:
We’ll
See Each Other on Facebook
was the only story with distracting use of nonstandard punctuation.
“First week; in a hostel.” Semicolons have only two jobs. This
one fits neither. Lots of parentheses, presumably not intended to
break the flow of the story, but do so regardless. Dashes are
sometimes -- and other times –. Compound adjectives are used so
enthusiastically they appear to be a fetish, even to the point of
misspelling as in “inter-country clusters.” Ellipses are assigned
with disregard for their common role in English: “Today is my last
day in Taipei, and they are the last things I see before leaving this
world... this moment in time.” What words were omitted? There is
haphazard use of italics and on and … .
Rating:
**** Four Stars
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