I think I am going to like this Gass, I thought, and here I am, at the end of it, hovering between four and five stars, as I so often do, but settling for that generous bedizening – the whole roster of stellar units.
Linked only by nefariously complex sentences, riddled with the kind of chewy phrases boys on the ballpark lawn would work with their chapped lips to pull and prod between clenched teeth, the stories here are fascinating, jewel-like run-on spasms through form and essence, like a sun-drenched day, like houses standing in rows, staring at some horizon you are too short to see, like a moon in the sky at midday, defying reason, but lingering like some pendant over blasted landscapes of ghost-peopled towns, where sunk in lazy fiddling, meandering maws squawk and fingers rummage pocket lint, where schooled but not well-reasoned kids resuscitate Caesar within the abstract labyrinths of their somnambulism. The setting is fashioned after some sort of dioramic blend of gothic minimalism, which somehow isn’t hollow. Like a fruit, well-full of rind and insect-swarming seeds, peeled open to reveal a glint of golden nectar. It’s nostalgic headway into dream. It’s a slow slackening of all the reeled strictures of noveled, inflexible fiction. We’ve walked these roads, met these stunted Shakespeares, but we seldom paid attention to the blinding patter of their paws, to the struggles they wield in their wild tunneling toward death. Little stories come and ungainly go, but certain stories capture in their amber, hallowed moments of crystal life, refracting the essence of that unknowable divine back into our double-mirrored minds. Snatch what you can from Gass’ gaseous brand of madness.
L. S. Popovich 