Short Story Collections (Stanbrough)

In this rollicking, gat-filled collection of eleven short stories, you get to see both sides. The mobsters and the cops. The perps and the victims. The guilty, the innocent and the merely complicit. These guys create and dispose of bodies, brag and complain and finagle a way out where no way out existed before. Come along for a wild ride! In most of these stories, we hear from the mobsters themselves. And these are not mere "gangstas," wearing filthy, ill-fitting jeans and unlaced combat boots while holding a pistol sideways so they look cool when they squeeze off a round. These are wise guys who know their business, though it isn't always strictly business. And they know their family, though it isn't always strictly a family. And they know loyalty, though sometimes they understand it a little too late. In one story, the reader will slip into the skin of a detective doing the much harder job on the other side of the mobster's macabre task.

These tales range from the merely odd to the fantastic, from the tragic to the magical. In one story you'll accompany a Cajun on a single-minded mission into the backwoods of Louisiana on a deep, humid night. In another, you'll witness the life or death struggle between a fifteen year old boy and the mean drunk who's been his oppressor for years. There's also a story about writing and the writer stalking his mentor; a job that very few could do but for which many would apply (wanna be a Mind Cleaner?); and a child's tale of a favorite pasttime: crushing bugs. Eric also offers up the ground rules for getting by when your shadow is doing odd things, writes of the passion between Giacomo Casanova and the one woman he has loved down through the ages, and wonders aloud what might happen if the characters in a story grew tired of a hack writer and banded together against him. Finally he takes the reader on a hectic road trip in "Interference," and ends with "A Natural Study of the Scream." All in all, this collection provides a very satisfying, if extremely unusual, reading experience. The reader will remember these stories.