Book Review: Human Tenderloin by Craig Wallwork

I think I'm going to experiment with adding my book reviews to this space for the one person who comes here.

                                             

Craig Wallwork’s Human Tenderloin is a collection of 16 short stories.

The opening track is ‘Bird Girl,’ a bit of a body horror/grotesquerie playing over the background of an apocalypse. Bird Girl’s outer world is grim and dark but its inner life contains warm, bright notes of hope. Like a lot of Human Tenderloin, it’s ultimately a story of Love - in this case, parental Love.

I really appreciated that facet of these stories.

Love - Capital L Love.

There are plenty of horrors out there, and none I’ve read have trod so steadily the narrow path of real, loving notes that don’t stray into greeting card sentimentality.

***Editorial sidebar: Too much of my reading (and viewing) in the last year has featured remorseless horrors that sell humanity short in exchange for brutal & shocking violence or rely on a cheap supposition to prop up shoddy approximations of better stories.***

The second entry in Human Tenderloin is ‘Dollhouse’ - a creepy little cursed object story, pressed into its musty surroundings like a footprint in a swamp. The dread slowly pools like water leeching up through the earth. Odds are, you’ll see the end coming - as you will with other stories here - but it doesn’t lessen the effect.

Similarly, the title track, ‘Human Tenderloin’ has a hazily visible climax that doesn’t tarnish the tale in the least, as it relies on its own bizarre circumstances and almost slapstick level humor to carry it through a tale largely about sourcing long pork for butchering and eating among a close-knit group of ghoulish gourmands.

My favorite entry in Human Tenderloin is ‘Paradise Won.’ ‘Paradise Won’ is an almost funny meditation on love and loss, repentance and forgiveness from the perspective of a widower renting a cabin from the devil. I won’t say more than that because, even though ‘Paradise Won’ does nothing to hide its cards, it manages to be surprising and moving nonetheless.

There are some truly bizarre mindbender horrors in here as well. Most notably: ‘The Hole’ ‘Time’s Flies’ ‘Murder Song’ and ‘They Were Born Without Faces’

‘Nothing Short of Dying’ is brutal, bizarre, downright gross, perhaps - and yet, it is a love story. And that is what elevates this and so many other stories in Human Tenderloin beyond being beautifully written oddities.

If there’s a low note here, it’s the hidden track, ‘The Ballad of Windsong House’ - a longer tale than the rest whose introduction is a bit laborious but serves its own payoff well. It has the feel of a bloated short story or perhaps a truncated novella. In the end, ‘Windsong’ circles back around to the connective tissue that holds the entire collection together, Love. Capital L Love.

I’ve been truly disenchanted by a lot of my reading of late, feeling that storytelling had become a contest of grim ideas and horrible suffering visited upon rooms stuffed with poor approximations of humanity. Human Tenderloin is populated by people that feel real, often sympathetic - at the very least understandable - even in the most horrific and strange of circumstances.

My only complaint about human Tenderloin is also one of its greatest strengths. The language is consistently beautiful and inventive. It always feels fresh and lush and filled with the Love that suffuses the entire collection. For me, it felt at times just the thinnest layer too thick, which is really hardly any complaint at all.

TLDR: Horror built on a solid foundation of Love, weirdness, and prose sharp enough to carve a steak from your leg. The collection I’ve read that shares the most DNA with Human Tenderloin is Joe Hill’s Full throttle - one of my all-time favorite collections.

By Way of Reintroduction

 SOo ...

Its been what? Three years since I dropped by here? 

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Why, you may ask, has it been so long?

Simple: I grew disenchanted and depressed by my work as a writer. I joined a writer's workshop in hopes that I would be able to hone my novel, Darkle, into something that might catch an agent's eye and thus find a place that would print it on paper for all to read. The workshop was populated with know-it-all do-nothings. A dozen people would arrive every Saturday morning, with no writing of their own, ready to give everything they laid eyes on the Simon Cowell treatment. 

The organizer/de facto leader of the group seemed to have founded it specifically to acquire captive readers for his pedophilic, rapey, misogynistic techno-porno, pseudo-enlightened opus. He claimed it existed in multiple, multi-thousand page volumes that have been in continual revision for twenty years. 

His inability to write, coupled with a strong desire to crush other writer's dreams caused the group to violently dissolve before a year passed. 

Nobody in the group was a reader of horror, thus nobody in the group really had a coherent perspective on my book. I received personal criticism of my character's choices, which only illuminated the fact that these people were not qualified commenters. I was even asked to take over the group after the drawing and quartering of the 5000 page wet dream. 

I said no and promptly quit writing, despairing of the process and the future of the craft itself as the more I read the more I felt like my entertainment had taken a back seat to intellectual posing and making cute references to pop bullshit.

**I've read two award-winning books this year and both bored the crap out of me. Whatever was happening is only getting worse. 

I could go on. 

I won't.

If you've made it this far, you know a little about why I walked away. Now, why'm I back? 

I was happy not writing for a long time. Not trying to squeeze a page or a paragraph in between all of life's obligations took some stress off, added some time for sleep, exercise, reading, meditation.

Then I wanted to write again - so I did. In months, I nearly doubled my lifetime output. I began submitting again and promptly sold Island Retreat to Dream of Shadows Issue 3. That was January. I have received dozens of personal rejections from dozens of very kind editors since then, but I remain frustrated in my attempt to really break into the world of paid publishing. The more I read, the more I realize I need to find the right people. I suspect the group is small. I'm certain they're you're out there. 

Find me.

Also, recently, I've made some efforts to revive my voiceover career. Part of that has been the fulfillment of a longstanding dream: Narrating fiction. You can check out some of my work at the very cool Horror Oasis. I hooked up with the oasis because I like their mission to ensure all voices are heard and because I thought I could add value with my voice skills. I'm stoked about it and hopeful this project keeps growing. 

I'm still writing. I've accepted that I'll never sell much, but I keep trying. As of this writing, I have 10 weirdos out, trying to make their way in the world. knock wood and cross fingers for me, willya?

Til next time,

@nicktionary19

Finding entertainment in the vast digital wasteland

I am constantly on the hunt for stories. I'm not talking about stories to tell, but stories to consume. It could be movies, TV, magazines, blogs, books, rock opera.

I generally dislike serial TV. Breaking Bad and Sports Night are the only series I ever watched end-to-end. And I watched a ton of X-Files back when I had an antenna on the TV. Lost, Six Feet Under, Better Call Saul - all lost me by the end of the 2nd season. I don't like investing in these things just to have the storytelling fall flat. I hate walking away in the middle of a story, but I'm not going to sit through 60 hours of filler just to find out what happens. TV serials - at some point - always fall into the trap of filling a season instead telling a story. The Walking Dead did the same thing to me. They got so high on their own importance that it seemed they thought all they had to do was tease a death at the end/beginning of the season and I'd come back for another 12 hours to find out who. Nope. I'm out. So anyway, usually no TV for me, unless it's old Twilight Zones or Outer Limits. Anyone remember Eerie Indiana?

I'll cop to enjoying The OA and Stranger Things, but they're still in the single season probationary period.

I often wonder what I'm doing here because I don't read blogs - or other screen-bound materials because I prefer not to read off of screens. I've tried ebooks on my phone and tablet with minimal success. It's just not the same as an actual book. Clearcut the forests for my entertainment.

I prefer nice, heavy hardcovers. Paperbacks are good, but too floppy. Too many ads in magazines. And with a new baby in the house, what little time I had to chill with some reading material has gotten even smaller.

I don't pay for cable. I have some very fine friends who allow me to piggyback their Netflix and Hulu logins. Every so often I get a coupon for Redox and spend 25 cents on a rental. But that's it. Kids, mortgage, groceries. I don't even compulsively buy used books at Barnes & Noble anymore.

If it ain't free, I ain't gettin' it.

Which is why I love some of the podcasts I've found recently. Fiction podcasts are the absolute funky shit. I have a lot of long days of simple, monotonous work and on those days I just plug in and listen.

This is where it started for me:

OpenCulture: Just an endless list of free stories. All public domain. Mostly semi-pro reads done thru Librivox If you're a HorrorHead like me, this is a great way to experience HP Lovecraft. But that's just a few of the roughly 900 free stories. Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and more.

That led me to what is one of my favorite corners of the internet: The New Yorker Fiction Podcast. The New Yorker is famed for its fiction and with good reason. What I really dig about this program is that it features an author who has been published in The New Yorker reading a story from the New Yorker that they love. That's already a nice little bit of geek fun, but it gets better because, after the reading, they do a little dissection/discussion about it with Deborah Treisman, the New Yorker's fiction editor. The discussions feel very informal and friendly. I almost always feel invited to interject on some point. Sort of the literary equivalent of a good commentary track on a DVD.

The NewYorker also has The Writer's Voice. Simple. no-frills. Just a recently published story read by the author.

As a horror/fantasy/sci-fi type guy, the New Yorker products keep me from staying insulated in my little genre bubble.

As for the Genre Bubble, I like The Nightmare Magazine Stories Podcast. Horror at a literary level, I suppose. Here, you'll find horror from all corners of the globe read by a few excellent readers. One of the shortcomings of a lot of podcasts and the like is that many people just aren't up to the task of reading aloud and simply butcher everything they read. Nightmare does not disappoint.

Next is Clarkesworld. Clarkesworld is a wide variety of sic-fi. Not my area of expertise, but it seems to be some of the best in the game represented here. All stories are read by Kate Baker. To her credit, she never gets old or falls flat.

I just added Pseudopod and Escape Pod to my podcasts and am quite happy with these as well. Both are audio only platforms for horror and sci-fi, respectively.

Those are the way I get my reading fix in a life that's often just too busy to keep my nose in a book for more than 30 seconds at a time.

And if another person says to me that I should be watching Game of Thrones, I might strangle them. "yeah, but it's got nudity and violence" is not sufficient to get me to commit to staring at a TV for 80 hours - and it makes me question a person's genetic diversity when that's their evidence for it being a good show.