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Distillery Songs

by Mike Spry

Readers who like to be shocked may take to Distillery Songs. I am not among them. I found the collection largely immature, and felt that it read as though the author’s ultimate aim was to offend. With stories like “Surrogacy,” in which a man finds solace from a breakup through intimate activities with inanimate objects (including his television set and the gas tank of a maroon ’94 Subaru Legacy), or “Golden,” which chronicles the downward spiral of a former orderly in a retirement  home, from full employment to drug abuse and repeated suicide attempts, accompanied only by his cat, Montreal’s Mike Spry certainly succeeds in that goal.

Cheap offence and momentary shock are not only easy enough effects to create, they’re self-defeating: too many jolts in a row become banal. Thus, having read through stories like “Golden” (which begins: “The widow Parker’s head exploded like a pigeon full of antacids”), the reader is numb by the time they reach “Surrogacy,” which opens with a lengthy description of what Ben wants to do with his shopping cart.

The humanity has been resolutely sucked from these stories in pursuit of shock value, but without some vestige of humanity, nothing is really shocking. It all becomes a wall of noise, which, unfortunately, overshadows the few stories that seem to aspire to more.

Distillery Songs reads like a Chuck Palahniuk knock-off, without any of the Fight Club author’s depth or insight. What Spry has written is little more than a series of gross-out jokes.

 

Reviewer: Robert J. Wiersema

Publisher: Insomniac Press

DETAILS

Price: $19.95

Page Count: 160 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-55483-022-0

Released: March

Issue Date: 2011-6

Categories: Fiction: Short