PEOPLE MAKING DANGER, Vol. 1: A variety pack of short reads on a journey through the strange and unexpected. Collection includes five books plus Valley Football & The Trop.
Neighbors grow together with the help of their friendly, local serial killer. A small town confuses Army training exercises with an alien invasion (based on a true story). Robbing a remote bank full of mob money goes very wrong and then gets worse. A violinist once played so magically they assumed he was pure evil. And a dead convict returns to his dusty hometown on the day his criminal career began. Meanwhile, existentially lost grownups in the suburbs start a midnight tackle football club and a haunted East Hollywood motel becomes home for classic stock characters on the down and out.
Reading. Why not do it for fun sometimes?
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"Adam Fike's work with cinema shows in this collection of short stories that blend the hooks of pulp fiction with sharp satire and a strong reverence for the ridiculous.
The stories, first published separately on Kindle Unlimited, deliver the entertainment promised in the collection's subtitle. Each story launches with a wildly different premise but is drawn with the same honed prose, snipped to its essence. Scenery in "High Desert," a Western heist replete with mobsters, grifters, and fast cars, is "a sea of tumbling underbrush and shimmering tangles of roadside trash." Lenny, the toughened convict of "Yardley County," is "a scrap-iron pile of muscle."
In the opening story, "The Quiet Ones," an unlikely serial killer dispenses dubious justice to the flawed characters of his neighborhood. "Operation Dragonhead," set in 1959, lampoons threats of alien invasion and military braggadocio with a send-up to small-town heroics. The aforementioned "Yardley County" hits with poignant punches as its anti-hero Lenny, after a prison escape kills him, revisits the brutal events that made him a con. Two added stories feature middle-aged men staging a midnight football game/fight club in the park and a collection of misfits who unite in a quest to help a shaken magician find his coin.
Supernatural elements snag readers' attention with vivid imagery, including in "Paganini," which questions whether the infamous violinist made a pact with a demon named Samael. Stock characters take on dimension with a single detail, like Dan's "Coworker" at the auditing firm in "Valley Football" who has a degree in linguistics.
Throughout, the lack of quotation marks for dialogue and the steady beat of the prose could lull unsuspecting readers into missing the subtext, but beneath the antics of small, shifty characters trying to survive, beats an enormous emotional generosity in these truly original works.
If Ray Bradbury and Charles Portis had a love child, it would be Adam Fike. These stories are highly recommended."
BLUEINK STARRED REVIEW
(NOTABLE BOOK)
