The Slaughterhouse Book Review

A blog for book reviews and author interviews

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Review of DEAR DAUGHTER by Elizabeth Little (Viking, 2014)

I haven’t done meth, nor will I ever, but I have seen enough Breaking Bad to know what it should look and feel like. Elizabeth Little’s first novel DEAR DAUGHTER does much of the same, rocketing readers along with all the speed and adrenaline of a carjacker in a Mustang while high on Blue Sky.

DEAR DAUGHTER follows Janie Jenkins, a former Hollywood starlet known for being Janie Jenkins—on par with Kim Kardashian known for being Kim Kardashian but, thanks to Little’s character development and a strong and consistent voice much, much more interesting.  Jenkins was also accused and them imprisoned for the murder of her philanthropist mother. After a decade spent in prison, her case is thrown out because of a technicality and the mishandling of evidence. Once released, Jenkins changes her identity with the help of her lawyer—the only person who believes she didn’t do it (Jenkins isn’t so sure herself)—and takes off to South Dakota in an attempt to uncover who really killed her mother all the while pursued by the media who are eager to find out what happened to Jenkins post-release.

Once in the small South Dakota town that is equal parts Deliverance and The Stepford Wives, Jenkins begins to unravel a mystery that reaches far beyond the bedroom where her mother was found dead. Jenkins must confront not only the possibility that her own identity will be revealed to the gossip-hungry media, but that the murderer may also know where she is and want to settle a score. Will she find the killer? Will she make it out of the Middle of Nowhere, South Dakota alive? Little forces readers to ask these questions over and over as Jenkins herself asks the very same throughout her quest.

Page after page of DD is saturated with tight, smart narrative. Jenkins’s voice is well-tooled—not once does she come off as too much or too saccharine, playing into stereotypical mystery novels. Instead, Little gives us a character that has a chip on her shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore and the mordant nature to want to divest herself of said chip. While Jenkins is the most thoroughly-constructed character, and rightfully so, some of the other players in Jenkins game are not as fleshed out and because of this, fall flat at times. Little tries, but there are times that the townsfolk Jenkins interacts with come across simply as actors filling the bit parts of Old Timey stereotypes—the conflicted sheriff, the town crook, the somewhat rebellious lesbians. All these characters shine bright in certain moments but come off as tarnished in others.

Some of the more interesting parts of DD are the chapter breaks, which take the form of a variety of releases from media.  Little does well to land the different voices for the different pieces, moving almost seamlessly between text messages, news bulletins, blog posts, and possibly the most entertaining of all the breaks, a Wikipedia page.  Some of the utility of these various posts seems forced—they end up playing a major role in one of the character’s storylines—but they do not do anything that clues in any other mystery novel would do.  It becomes evident, the more one reads, how important these pieces are the narrative arc. They fill in the undercurrent and the background of the story without unnecessary prose, allowing Little to zoom through the actual narrative and maintain a feverish pace with relative ease. 

The only time Little’s choice of using the media is questionable comes at the end, when, after the narrative ends, Little gives three pieces in a row, filling in the details of what happened after the final scene. It is an interesting choice in that Little did so much work to develop a strong character only to drop her a few pages early in favor of characters who only figured into the story in middling ways. It makes the narrative stop too abruptly. The possibilities for what would come next are clear at the end of the story, and it could’ve very easily stayed that way without merely throwing it out in a press release style.

In her first novel, Elizabeth Little provides readers with a great taste of potentially what is to come.  You could choose any series of adjectives usually reserved for action movies to appropriately describe DD, and it would be okay, because they would fit. The novel is as pulse-pounding as Die Hard, as highly-charged as Speed and as thrilling as any one of The Expendables, though to be fair, Little has chosen (smartly) to not involve every past-his-prime action actor from the last three decades in her work. If she chose to do so in her next novel, though, surely DD is a sign that she’d be able to do it and do it well.

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Interview with Sheldon Lee Compton

From time to time I am going to put up interviews that I conduct with the authors of the books that I review. This is the first interview of that sort, as my review of Where Alligators Sleep will be out shortly at the Atticus Review. Alligators is a collection of flash fiction, so I asked Sheldon as much as I could about the craft before he would get tired of the words "flash fiction" and want to beat me to shut me up.

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Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of The Same Terrible Storm and the forthcoming collection Where Alligators Sleep, both from Foxhead Books. His next book, Brown Bottle will be released next year through Artistically Declined Press. Among his various awards and achievements, he has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. He can be found at his website, Bent Country.

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Did you choose the name or did the publisher choose the name from your stories? How does the title speak for the collection?  

I chose the name.  I liked that the title, from one of the short stories in the book, could speak to a larger theme.  I struggled, though, because people might expect there to be alligators in the book somewhere and there just ain't.  The cover art also plays heavily on alligators sporting an alligator's skull on the front and a full alligator on the back.  But, in the end, most of the places the stories will take readers is are dark ones, so I thought the title worked well because I can't really think of too many places more dark than where alligators sleep.  Mysterious too, maybe.

  After I finished writing my novel, I felt tired as if I’d run a marathon. How does it feel completing flash fiction? Is there something about the intensity of such a short work that contributes to any specific feelings when they are done?  

Finishing a flash piece feels quiet a lot different than finishing a novel, but no less satisfying.  In the end, a story is being told and finishing that always feels good.  But there's something special about finishing a flash piece, I guess.  Most of the time the story goes from speck of an idea to completed within a couple hours, most of the times less.  That's cool, you know?  With a novel it's a series of small victories or defeats and then the book is there.  I like that flash fiction can be as quick a fix for the writer as it can be for the reader.

It seems more and more journals are seeking these shorter types of pieces. Why do you think that it? Can you speak to the current state of flash and micro-fiction in the country?  

I'm not sure I can speak to the overall appeal, which I agree is there, other than to say I think people's attention spans are shorter now.  The internet has changed all the games, and fiction is no exception.  It now takes a certain amount of bravery to write a long story or novella or novel and figure it will be good enough to hold a person's interest in these days and times.  Most of the journals that take flash fiction on a regular basis are non-paying markets, and I'm not sure what that says other than the flash form is still relatively new, maybe?  Still, the larger markets, of which I've basically given up on, will occasionally take something hyper short, as long as a big name is attached to it. So maybe they're coming around.  But, generally speaking, it's an enjoyable form to both read and write and I'd do it if magazines stopped taking those kind of stories tomorrow.  I just find flash entertaining and challenging.

  Did you work concurrently on any longer projects while putting together this collection?  

  I did.  Many of these stories were written and published over a three year period and then collected together for the book, so during that time I was writing on what would become the novella Brown Bottle, which will be out next summer from Artistically Declined Press.  I'd say most writers do this sort of thing.  I've written a total of four novels - two of them learning novels - and always worked on shorter pieces while doing that.  It helps me to be able to step away from a longer work and get that fast fix of a short story or flash story.

  What do you think makes for an effective flash fiction piece?

  Flash stories I've read and liked usually are trying to be something big.  By that I mean, I've read a lot of flash fiction that is really nothing more than a character sketch or a bit of setting with a blank character thrown in because, well, a story needs a character.  The good flash pieces I've come across are most of the time trying to say something big in a subtle way.  Not obscure, mind you, but subtle.  That's the trick, I think.  You need to be doing something involved in the flash piece but not in sort of an obscure way that poetry can tend to incorporate.  With flash fiction, you have to remember all the solid rules for writing a story and then find a way to break them down to make it compact and clean and, hopefully, what I call gut-punch effective. 

  Did you decide at the outset that you were going to do a collection of flash fiction or did it simply evolve into that?

  The collection evolved from those stories across three years I mentioned earlier.  However, after I had about twenty or so I started thinking collection, to be honest.  And I probably kept that in mind as I finished the others.  The new collection has 67 stories.  That's another thing about flash...more story for the buck, I guess.  This collection also stands apart in a lot of ways from my first.  My first collection, The Same Terrible Storm, consisted of about twelve or so regional stories told in a traditional way.  This collection Where Alligators Sleep has a lot of differnent themes and structures.  I even have a poem in there based on my brother who passed away.  Now that I think about it, having one poem in a collection of flash seems a little strange, but that's about my ratio for me poems to stories.  I've never claimed to be a poet.

While writing, were you attempting to send individual stories out for publication or did you sit on them? What do you think the merits of your choice are?

  With the stories in both Storm and Alligators, I wrote them and submitted them to journals and magazines with not much thought to having them published in book form.  While in the process of doing that, Stephen Marlowe at Foxhead Books came across some of the published stories with Storm and asked if I had a manuscript on  hand.  I had already taken those stories from Storm and pulled them together into a collection and set that off to them.  It was taken and so I started looking more closely at pulling together the stories from Alligators and pitching this to them, as well.  Fortunately, they agreed to take that book, too.  As for sitting on stories, that's something I'm trying to do now.  I have a project I'm working on with photographer Heather McCoy and I'm writing 50 stories of 1,000 words each based on her 50 photographs in the book, and I'm trying to sit on those as much as possible in order to offer a collection of unread stories.  In this way, readers will have something entirely new from me, if they so choose to give them a read at all.

  What can a reader get from a flash fiction piece as opposed to a short story or a novel? 

  A reader can get that instant gratification, I think, first of all.  But also, in a short prose piece, like I said things must be more compact.  I like to think there are a few more secrets held within a flash piece, more room for the reader to discover things on their own.  In a novel, nearly every action, even if it's a character making a pot of coffee, is detailed out.  The writer just doens't have to make nearly as many choices with the longer work.  With the flash story, much of those details can still be there, but it's given more like a whisper in the readers ear, nudging them to come to their own conclusions.  And I like that, and think readers do, too.  They want to discover something on their own through the reading of the story.  It gets them more involved, more invested.  These are just a few of the benefits of flash fiction that can often not be a clearly present in novels or novellas.

  What is the most difficult thing about writing for you? 

  I have the hardest damn time trying to distance or separate myself all together from what readers of my work may be expecting from me.  That's not to say I'm reluctant to please readers or keep them in mind while writing, but if you read reviews of your books (and I have done my fair share of that) it's impossible, for me at least, to get back the workdesk and write with a sense of adventure and discovery.  I've been too often lost in what I think people will think about this chapter or that chapter, will they read this flash story and find it half-baked.  I think the minute you start writing with these kinds of concerns completely dictating what your working on, you're almost always going to make a mess of whatever project you're working on.  Some people find that one reader, someone they write for and want to please or entertain or impress.  What really gets me working hard is the idea that the very act of writing a book and then having it shared with the world (or at the very least the small faction of other writers in the world) you are taking a pretty confident if not cocky stand.  You're saying I've written something and it's good enough and imporant enough that  you should drop fifteen or so bucks down and give it a chance.  A friend of mine and a fine writer Charles Dodd White shared with me in a recent interview something I'm know determined to keep in mind while writing.  Charles said, "There’s enough crap out there that’s written to popular formula. I think we have to justify another story or book by the practice of intensity."  And I just love that idea.  Write with intensity, a seriousness that is paying respect to a general readership that has seen a lot of writing and story ideas.  We should work our asses off to make sure if they pick up our book we have given everything we have to give from a perspective that is uniquely ours.  If I can do that, and it's insanely difficult, I can rest assured I've taken every step possible in living up to the idea that I've written a book that has something to say that's warrants readint the book or is entertaining enough for anyone at all to give it the time of day.  So, long story summarized, I want to write for myself and hope others find something in it that matters to them while also working at it with enough "intentsity" as Charles said so that it's worth their while once the work is out in the world.  Dang, pretty sure I rambled there, but my mind sometimes just jumps like a fly on a hot rock and all I can do is try to wrangle it back to pack.   

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Interviewed by Dear English Major

Name: Sam Slaughter Age: 26 College & Majors/Minors: Elon University - BA, 2009, English/Creative Writing & Anthropology. Stetson University - MA, 2014, English. Current Location: DeLand, FL Current Form of Employment: Fiction Writer and Brewery Social Media Manager Where do you work and what is your current position? I currently work as a social media manager for a small craft brewery in DeLand, Florida. Starting this fall, I will also be an adjunct professor at the institution that I received my MA from. In addition, I do copywriting or editing for a few different people in town on a client-to-client basis. Tell us about how you found your first job, and how you found your current job (if different). I fell into one, and for the other it was just as easy. I’ve always been interested in beer, wine, spirits, brewing, et cetera. From the time my college roommate and I attempted and eventually made abysmal homebrewed beer, I knew that it was always going to be something that I circled. In stories, I think Flannery O’Connor was the one that said you had to have your characters circle the same drain, or something to that effect. Alcohol, both making it and writing about it, is my drain. When I moved out to Montana for Grad School 1.0, I called all the wineries in the area and asked if they’d teach me. One place got back to me and did so. When I got down here, my boss’s husband knew some people that homebrewed and invited me over on a day they were brewing. I brewed, then did it again and then again. I stuck around. As they began to visualize a brewery, I was always there. I made the beer, I poured the beer, I drank the beer. With previous bar experience, I was/still am necessary to the brewery in the sense that I know more about the beer than most and I can also sell it better than most (an ability to play with words helps this out a lot). I may not be able to talk to strangers face to face on the street (the writer part of me coming out), but I sure as hell can sell you a pint of craft beer from behind a bar. For the position with the university, I asked. After graduating, I was trying any and everything to find a job that would allow me to pay my bills. Teaching appealed to me—I’d co-taught a class while a grad student with my mentor and I have other teaching experience (City Year, an Americorps program)—so I sent an email inquiring about open positions with my university. Thankfully, they had some, I interviewed and now I’m preparing to fly solo with my first college class. To address the last part, it all happens by networking. In such a small town, it isn’t hard to be known for your words. When you make enough acquaintances who then learn you can write and write better than most, copywriting jobs occasionally pop up. Business isn’t booming, but by asking people if they could use better copy for websites or whatever, you get a job here and there. It keeps me writing a variety of things and it, who knows, could lead to other freelance gigs in the future. I just keep asking and letting people know I’m available. What was another job that was important in your career?  Practically, an important job was working for a newspaper as a beat reporter. Two years after I graduated from Elon, I moved from Montana, where I'd spent a year floundering in graduate school, back home to New Jersey, where I took the job as a reporter. I learned a couple of things while at that position. First, I learned to write in the very basic, journalistic way that I had neglected to do throughout college. Working as a reporter for a small weekly, you learn to strip away any of the fancy bells and whistles of language in an effort to paint a simple portrait of, say, a town council meeting. In defense of town council meetings, though, there is no place for fancy bells and whistles.  Not so practically, a job that sticks out for me is a summer I spent working as a gravedigger. You can call it a cemetery groundskeeper or a lawn facilities technician or some other fancy title, but I was a gravedigger. I used a shovel and I put people in the ground. It sounds harsh, I know, but it was also the perfect opportunity as a writer to learn. This job, and any other not-so-important jobs I’ve held over the years, especially ones that are more manual labor than intellectual labor, allow for time to think. I plotted stories while I worked, even if I never wrote them. I catalogued details of place. I tried out dialogue while I was out amongst the headstones weed whacking. I try to balance practically and impracticality in my life if for nothing else than to remind myself that I need to make mistakes or I’m going to lead one hell of a boring life and more importantly a life not worth writing about. What did you do in college to prepare for your post-grad life? I wish I could say I did something specific. I didn’t though. Like I said earlier, I just happened to circle the same drain a lot. Really, there were two drains, so maybe this has to turn into a simile more like two planets, some gravity, and a ball in the middle. I swung from one orbit to the other and back in a figure eight pattern for a long time. Similes aside, I knew from a young age (eighth grade or so) that I wanted to write. I knew later on that I wanted to be around alcohol. Whatever I was doing, I kept those two things somewhere in my mind. They weren’t always in the front, but they were there. If your passion is strong enough, you learn to mix it into your everyday life. That’s all I did. I made sure words and booze were around all the time. The booze part is more difficult than the words part, but you learn over the years how to do it. As long as you know you haven’t forgotten about it—and the sheer fact that you remind yourself not to forget about whatever it is being the proof of that ( I think that’s how that works)—then you’ll be fine. Find your passion and don’t let it go. What is your advice for students and graduates with an English degree? If you want to be a writer, try to have a job that does not involve writing. It may sound counterproductive, but I felt the least inspired (and the least energized) to write when all I did all day every day was write. When i got home, I had enough energy to go to the gym and then I'd sit around and complain about my job to my family. Instead, find some physical. Use your body and tire out everything, but your mind. Work somewhere where you will interact with people. Even if it isn't something permanent, it'll be useful. Work in the service industry. If you want to write in any sort of genre, this experience will give you settings, characters, you name it. The weird people you will meet when you work at a bar will provide an endless font of ideas for stories, poems, essays, everything. If nothing else, it'll provide an insight into how not to treat other people when you are out to dinner and that, I feel is quite useful in life. [Sidebar: Working in a job where you write some, I think is also a good thing, though seeing as that is what I do, I recognize that I am bias. I like to think of it like an engine—writing all the time it'll overheat and you'll be left on the side of some lonely highway in North Dakota wondering whether or not a true crime show was shot in the area, but writing some of the time keeps the engine running, and running well so that when you do get to write you can perform optimally.] To add to that, and this will sound cliché so for that I apologize, but try stuff. Live a little. When you spend all of your time with your nose in a book or sitting in front of a lit screen, you tend to miss out on things. I'm not saying go out every chance you get—that is probably as useless as never going out unless you take damn good notes—but don't be afraid to occasionally interact with others. Most won't bite and if they do, they're probably trying to be playful. If they're not, then you've got one hell of a story if you get out of there alive. Finally, writing is a job, so expect to always (unless you're one of the incredibly successful and lucky ones) to always hold down two jobs. One you may never get paid for, but it deserves just as much attention if you want to be successful at it. Write and read whatever and whenever you can. Fail at writing and get rejected a lot. Get hurt by the rejection, fume over it, hug a teddy bear or a loved one, have a beer, strengthen your resolve to not let it happen again, then get back to it. It sounds a bit harsh, I know, but if you're not writing with a passion that can overcome that stuff, then why write? Visit Sam on his professional  website and follow him on twitter @slaughterwrites. READ MORE: Kat Clark: Assistant Director of Marketing & Communications Dan Moyer Jr.: Screenwriter Christine Stoddard: Writer/Filmmaker, Co-owner & Creative Director of Quail Bell 

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Review of A SHELTER OF OTHERS by Charles Dodd White

Reviewed by Sam Slaughter In his second novel, Charles Dodd White once again drives deep down the roads of his fictional Sanction County, an area in the Appalachian Mountains where, it seems, the ties that bind do so until circulation of the right ...

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Interview with Charles Dodd White

SS: Where did the idea for this novel come from? CDW: I was interested in a lot of stuff that depicted wilderness and I was interested in some of the things that William Gay did in his novel Twilight, but kind of refining not just the language but ...

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Originally published at The Review Review

[slaughterhousebookreview]

Originally published at The Review Review

[slaughterhousebookreview]

Originally published at The Review Review

[slaughterhousebookreview]

Welcome

Hello and welcome. Over the past two years or so, I've slowly begun, as I imagine a lot of writers do, to read more and more. In reading more and more, I've begun to write about reading in the form of book reviews. Sometimes, I'm lucky enough to get those reviews published. If I'm even luckier, I've been able to talk to the authors about the books, the craft, and anything else that comes to mind. 

This blog will be my home base as far as reviews and interviews go. I'll throw up links to published work and also put up content not published anywhere else. 

If you have a book you'd like me to review, email me at [email protected] and we can chat. If you're an author who likes to talk about yourself, shoot me an email, too, and we can set up an interview.

-Sam