A world gone bad -- #Review #ShortStories #SpeculativeFiction @biffmitchell

Blurb

Welcome to the World You Live In.

It’s a mess. It’s diseased, polluted, over-populated and too close to the sun. But it’s all we have and we’re losing it fast, so we may as well have a good laugh before the sun reaches out and reclaims us.

In Blowing Up, Biff Mitchell shakes the foundations of a world gone bad with outrageous dollops of inappropriate humor. Nothing is sacred, nothing is spared. Nothing is safe in a world accumulating too much ammunition for too few targets.

So welcome to Mitchell’s world of ghosts who have to get the last word, ball-busting muses who torture for the hell of it, a woman who sheds rabbits from her eyes instead of tears, an office of petty-minded workers fused together in a nuclear holocaust and a world where you write grammatically correct essays or starve to death.

But there will be laughter.

Excerpt : from “Surfing in Catal Hyuk”

It would be impossible for anyone to lead a more ordinary life than Bobby Parker, whose life was ordinary to the extent that the more you saw him and the more you knew about him, the less you would remember him and the less you would think about him.

He was pizza without toppings. Bran flakes without milk.

He lived for seventy-two years, the average allowable age for a married white male in his particular milieu. Two hours after his funeral, Libby, his wife of thirty years, was deep in a game of bridge. When her best friend, Laura Jenkins, who’d arrived at Bridge Night late because she had just returned from her grandfather’s funeral in another town, said: “I’m so sorry, Libby, dear,” Libby, who’d done badly in the first round of play replied without taking her eyes off her cards:

“That’s OK, Laura. I think I’ll do better this round.” And she smiled so sweetly, like a little darling.

Within days of his death, even his children, Roxanne and Leo, had difficulty remembering his face but then they wouldn’t have remembered it when he was alive, five minutes after talking to him.

Here’s what Bobby Parker looked like: his face was sort of round in a kind of square way that wasn’t so much long as it was short and nobody seems to recall the color of his eyes. He wasn’t tall but he wasn’t squat. His weight was right on the money. He dressed in clothing appropriate to the occasion and he never mixed pink and gray. He may have been losing hair but one thing is certain: his hair was dark brown.

Or was it light brown?

But one thing is certainly certain: Bobby Parker worked for thirty-five years in an accounting firm. He wasn’t exactly an accountant, more like just a clerk, doing clerking things that involved forms and files and filling in blanks. At the beginning of his career he had a rubber stamp that he could apply to those forms. He loved that rubber stamp. At some point before he retired, he stopped using the stamp. Nobody at the firm remembers that stamp. Nobody at the firm can recall a form needing the application of a rubber stamp. Nobody at the firm remembers, recalls, recollects, reflects upon, or reminisces over Bobby Parker. This was true one minute after he left the firm on his retirement day. This was true for the entire thirty-five years that he worked for the firm.

The fact that he received a pension check at the end of each month is probably proof for the existence of God, or at least a remarkably successful test bed for payroll software. In fact, everything that happened to Bobby Parker from the moment of his birth was anticlimactic in the way that turning off a tap stops the flow of water, but might allow a continuous drip.

Review by Lisabet Sarai

“There’s a lot of crap out there, and shit falls out of the sky, but not on me. I’m the source of my own crap and people respect me for that. I’m like the faucet I can’t turn off. Wordsworth’s spontaneous overflow without the meter. I’m a damn flood.”

This quote, the second paragraph in Biff Mitchell’s collection of short stories, could perhaps be taken as a summary of the book as a whole. I don’t mean to suggest that Blowing Up is crap – quite the opposite – but this bit captures the author’s fluency of expression as well as his penchant for self-denigration. His stories are simultaneously shocking and funny, literate and profane, a riot of cynical creativity brightened by occasional flashes of compassionate insight.

I chose to review this book because I know it’s difficult to find readers for short fiction. I didn’t have any expectations, which is fortunate, because this volume would have violated them – whatever they were. Blowing Up doesn’t fit well into any category. A mixture of satire and science fiction, spiritual pondering and scatalogical polemics, the book is utterly original.

Many of the stories are deeply disturbing. Mr. Mitchell does not seem to have a high opinion of humanity, or of himself for that matter. Nevertheless, his artistry impressed me, and when I finally finished reading, I felt surprisingly good despite having been raked over the emotional coals.

“These Eyes” is representative, a cautionary tale about relationships and the wisdom of leaving well enough alone. The narrator has hooked up with the woman of his dreams. He’s contented, fulfilled. Life is near perfect. Even his photography career seems to be thriving. Yet somehow he is obsessed by the notion that there’s something terribly wrong with his beloved. Of course, it turns out that he is right.

“Food for Words” offers a snapshot of a future where food is so scarce that cannibalism has become institutionalized. The only way to acquire food is to write about it. If your essay describes the food you crave with sufficient vividness and skill, you may be selected to eat rather than be eaten. Needless to say, those who are too lazy or too unskilled to write have been weeded out of the population long ago.

With its escalating violence, “Killing Assholes” will put you through the wringer. At the same time, it’s an amazing piece of craft, with an ending so apt that my admiration overcame my revulsion.

The title of the collection comes from one of the longest pieces in the collection: “100 People, 10 Bats and 1 Cat Blowing Up”. This darkly humorous story provides a window into the minds of a wide assortment of characters in the few minutes before a nuclear explosion vaporizes them. There’s no moralizing here, but you can’t help introspecting about your own preoccupations, and how trivial they may be.

Perhaps my favorite entries are the two very personal vignettes in which the author bares his own insecurities: “Still Life with Sax and Muse” and “Still Life with Muse and Rain”. They chronicle surrealistic conversations with the author’s muse, a seductive green-eyed vixen named Jo who continuously ridicules him while challenging him to articulate her lessons and release his talent. She laces her criticisms with absurd epithets, calling him “pointillist punctuator”, “pretentious noun nudger”, “verb vermin”, “noun hound”, “paragraph parser”. An author myself, I can appreciate Mr. Mitchell’s doubts and confusion, though I’m not sure I could express them as well:

Blushing deeper, I changed the subject. I was running out of strategies. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’ve been tripping over metaphors, drowning in symbols, sinking in structure, ship-wrecking in un-modulated literary constructions.” I had no idea what I was talking about.

“And it really annoys me,” she said, “listening to you spout off at the mouth when you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Time to shut up and listen.

"That’s right, clause crawler. Now listen.” She leaned forward spilling infinite cleavage across the expanse of my vision. “The story is in the telling.”

She paused.

For about a minute.

A minute with a silent muse is like a lifetime in a country song. “Are you equating my cleavage with the telling?” she said.

Reams of cleavage stories rushed past my eyes. I snapped them upwards into the green fields of my torment―whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. “But…where’s the art in that?” I said.

Wrong question. I was on the wall again. Point of entry: left ear. Point of exit: the other nipple.

“You’re missing the point, meta-moron. The telling is the art.”

Muses always come out on top in this sort of conversation. Still, reading the results in Blowing Up, I have a sense that the author has indeed taken Jo’s advice to heart.

About the Author

Biff Mitchell is a speculative fiction/humor writer living in Atlantic Canada. He’s managed to trick publishers and editors on three continents into publishing his novels and shorts stories. For ten years, he tortured aspiring writers with his Writing Hurts Like Hell workshop taught through the University of New Brunswick.

Website

https://biffmitchell.com/

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Blog

https://biffmitchell.wordpress.com/

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@biffmitchell

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