
NO EXIT NEEDED: A Review of Danny the Ambulance
If the Jury Room is supposed to be some kind of hell, we should all be so lucky to wind up in a hell like this.
If the Jury Room is supposed to be some kind of hell, we should all be so lucky to wind up in a hell like this.
Joshua Dalton’s debut collection I Hate You, Please Read Me (House of Vlad Press, Feb 2021) can also be read as a novel in fragments: It uses tweets, direct messages, flash-length stories, and a much-anticipated closing screenplay to communicate a pitiful, media-saturated existence. While never explicit, it seems clear that the stories and interactions all exist in dare-we-say anti-hero Marshall Crawford’s world in varying degrees of intimacy, to paint a character portrait of self-pity, self-awareness, and self-abuse. Even stories about other characters appear as representations of his own self-image, merely presented from an angle, using TV tropes and dripping with…
Pets: An AnthologyEdited by Jordan CastroReview by Matt Boyarsky I’ve been bitten by a dog exactly once. The dog’s name was Nelly. She jumped on me in what I thought to be a gesture of playfulness before she tore into my forearm. Nelly’s owner screamed. How could someone so good at making her happy do something horrible? “Do you need help?” she asked. I told her I was okay, that the dog was just doing her job. A dumb thing to say. The owner seemed the type of person to have her animals up to date on their shots, and…