Different Kinds Of Dead And Other Tales

It?s all about Guys and Dolls in Ed Gorman?s new collection of 15 stories. Ranging from thriller to horror to science fiction, these tales will rivet and terrify ? they?ll also make you laugh, albeit with appreciation for a nasty, sometimes brutish, sense of humor.

Take the first story, ?Muse,? for example: local boy makes good as a brilliant song-writer, returns to his old haunts to romance a ravishing beauty who wouldn?t give him the time of day before he hit the big time, ends up dead ? and the poor slob whose left behind to put the pieces together falls right into the scandalous secret of the famed song-smith?s top-notch talent, a secret
others would cheat, lie, even kill to possess. ?Muse? is a neatly packed little slice of the hardboiled genre, and as in most hardboiled fiction, blondes equal trouble.

Sometimes the beautiful dame is more than a player, though. Sometimes, as in ?A Girl Like You,? ?Second Most Popular,? the pungent little whopper ?The Broker,? and especially the more or less matched pair ?The Long Sunset? and ?Yesterday?s Dreams,? it?s the girl? or woman, angel, demon, alien, whatever these chicks really are under their pink skin and gleaming tresses? who is the source. Men flock and buzz around them; men swoon and die in their presence. ?The Broker? concerns the addictive effects of a woman named Nadia, billed ?The wildest fuck in the Windy City? (a lot of Gorman?s stories take place in Chicago); ?Yesterday?s Dreams? spins a yarn about a blonde named Jenny, whose abilities to heal the sick and injured make her a target for the rich and ruthless ? as well as the poor and weak. Jenny has a twin sister in ?The Long Sunset,? in the form of Jenna, who, following a close encounter with a UFO (or so she claims), finds that she can heal emotional scars and the low-level anxiety of
life itself. Jenny is blind; Jenna is alcoholic. They are both attached to men who treat them like personal property, and they both need a rescuer to pry them out of the arms of their abusive boyfriends. They are both, in a sense, the Virgins who mirror the Whores that appear in other stories in this book (quite literally, in the case of the above-mentioned ?The Broker,? or in the
psychologically gruesome ?Deathman,? in which an executioner in the wild west takes refuge in the arms of a woman for hire), and they are the sorts of stories that tend to ignite the reactionary ire of power grrrls everywhere, but Gorman?s is the grizzled, hard-shelled voice of a certain kind of writer, a writer who delves so far into male experience that he unearths the tremulous core of fear and need at the center of the masculine psyche.

Gorman joins his particular set of fascinations and literary impulses to apocalyptic sci-fi in ?Survival? (Fundamentalist Christians destroy the world in order to provoke the Rapture, Christs?s Return, and all that fun stuff ? only for the end result to be the near extinction of civilization, with no Final Battle between Good and Evil anywhere to be seen, just a more lowly and hard-knuckled version of all the same venalities and brute choices about nurturing and killing that humankind has always had to muddle through) and wild-western not-so-fair play in ?Junior? and ?Emma Baxter?s Boy.?

The title story, too, contains swaths of sweetness tinctured with blood and pain, as Gorman retells an urban legend (rainy night, female hitchhiker) from a decidedly more mature vantage than the usual summer-camp, haunted highway variation. If there?s a Jack Kerouac ? or an Ernest Hemingway ? of the supernatural, Ed Gorman?s a top contender for the title.