At the end of June I was contacted by Eirik Gumeny, Editor at the Jersey Devil Press. Eirik asked if I would be interested in providing some homegrown support to his press and review some of the material that they printed. Always willing to help out a fellow New Jerseyan, I accepted. The end result was Eirik sending me a copy of The 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology, which is edited by Eirik Gumeny himself.
After reading through the anthology – which contains twenty short stories from a variety of New Jersey writers – I’m not sure what to think. I even went back and re-read some of the stories a second time to see if my first impressions were a bit off. They weren’t. In short, I’m not sure whether I absolutely love some of these stories or whether I want to put my head through a wall while I’m reading them. The more I think about it, though, the more I think that some of these stories are really impressive and others are some of the worst writing that I’ve ever read in print.
And the truth is that the quality ranges are that wide. Some of the stuff that appears in The 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology is worthy of being submitted to larger annual collections of short stories. Other stories, though, are the type of stuff that you come across when scouring the internet for the most obscure, weirdo blogs that one can find. What also turned me off to some of these poorly written stories was a few spelling and grammar mistakes here and there. I don’t know if these mistakes were part of the individual authors’ intentions, but it was annoying for me as a reader.
The works in The 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology range from the bizarre to the thought-provoking to the college-creative-writing-class-type essay to the loner-writing-on-a-blog. What most (if not all) of the short stories have in common is a dark humor that presses through each tale. Quite frankly, some of the stories are distracted by the seemingly unwritten requirement to include dark humor in the narrative. I would suggest that the only stories that get the tone right with respect to dark humor are Run Away by Z. Z. Boone and Snowpocalypse by Danger_Slater. Those two writers absolutely have a future in this type of writing, should they choose to pursue it. Here’s one of the passages from Snowpocalypse that had me smiling and chuckling a little bit as I read the story:
A legion of shoppers gather behind him. They are people from all walks of life – teachers, policemen, priests and doctors. Larry demonstrates their collective power by having them sing a few bars of The Oscar Meyer Weiner Song.
“What the fuck?” Wayne says to me, “What is happening to them?”
“I don’t know,” I reply.
“It’s like they’ve been brainwashed or something,” he says.
“Perhaps it’s all the years of subliminal messaging that the advertising industry has shoved down our throats,” I say, “All the commercial jingles and billboard salvation; all the pressure and speed of our capitalist culture – it’s like they’ve been turned into…”
“Zombies!” Wayne finishes my thought.
Ha! Take that, status quo! Seriously, I read that passage and started smiling and giggling a little bit. Those lines are a job well done by Danger_Slater. Ha ha – I’m still laughing at it now, actually.
If you’re looking for something completely different (and I do mean completely different), then you should pick up a copy of The 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology. Overall, I found it to be a refreshing read – completely different than anything else on my bookshelf. I’m looking forward to seeing what else comes out of the Jersey Devil Press – I’ll be sure to let you all know when I hear anything out of New Jersey’s latest publisher!
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