“Against Everything”: A review of Steve Anwyll’s “Welfare”

Steve Anwyll’s debut novel Welfare—dropped on Christmas Day by Tyrant Books—is a book that—much like its teenage narrator—takes an antagonistic stance against a lot of things. It is anti-purple prose. It is also an anti-coming-of-age novel, following a young character in that awkward adjustment stage between boy and man as he runs away from home to… find himself, maybe learn a couple life lessons? No. To live on welfare and avoid work and get high as much as possible. I said he was a seventeen-year-old boy, where else would this be going?

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“Patti Smith Holding a Gun”: A Review of Jeff Jackson’s “Destroy All Monsters”

Jeff Jackson’s Destroy All Monsters is about a band struggling to stay together after their friend and former bandmate is among many musicians murdered onstage in an epidemic of mass shootings at concert venues. It’s about the ex-girlfriend of that dead musician. It’s about the city around that dead musician. It’s about the dead musician. In ways you wouldn’t expect, it’s sometimes about the shooters. It’s about you and me. It’s about the time we live in, the times our ancestors lived in. It’s about music. It’s about burning your house down. It’s about facing the gun and being behind it.

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Aphrodisiacs and Flaming Arrows: A Review of Andrew J. Stone’s “All Hail the House Gods”

Imagine a world where children grow up in a government tent facility, taught to practice breeding with each other until the day comes they are actually able to reproduce, at which point they will marry and be forced to produce a child for the government to take away from them every year, and so on and so on. Now, imagine sentient houses who rule as gods and require children chosen lottery-style to be offered up as sacrifices. Andrew J. Stone […]

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Capturing the Silence: A Review of Chris Campanioni’s “Drift”

In one of the first stories of Chris Campanioni’s Drift, there is a photographer named Jared Garrett who repeats over and over again his desire to capture everything, going so far as to wonder – beneath a purple sky, listening to coyotes howl in the distance – if he could capture the silence within a moment. This character’s fervent aspirations reflect what the author seems to be attempting throughout the rest of the book: to capture the things we cannot […]

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Eternal Angst: A Review of Troy James Weaver’s “Temporal”

I was fifteen, standing on a step ladder in my parent’s closet, holding my dad’s gun to my head. No, wait, maybe I was sixteen? Either way, there was me and this ladder and this nine-millimeter to my temple. The ladder was ‘cause Dad kept the gun on top of a large dresser. The gun was ‘cause I was done with the bullshit. What happened next doesn’t matter, because it didn’t end there – all the angst and inner turmoil, […]

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