Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories
Gregory Frost is a writer of uncommon power, passion, and persuasion, a voice that speaks truth to power and apathy alike. With unerring metaphors, he zeroes in on the imbalances and outrages that most of us cannot articulate. Where the many might feel the vague, incomplete outline of a cultural moral failing, a very few -- Frost among them -- can pick them out from the landscape and see them for what they are. It’s a rare gift, his kind of vision, and it can’t be fun to live with.
Frost’s fiction is not always fun either. In this new collection of fourteen shorter works, Frost spins fantastical fables that sometimes stray into the realm of traditional science fiction, as in "A Day in the Life of Justin Argento Morrel," which is more or less a version of the dreadful Disney movie "The Black Hole," only re-imagined for adults with an appreciation for a story well told, or the Edgar Allen Poe house of horrors that is "In the Sunken Museum." More often, Frost’s work is harder to characterize: the wrenching, white-faced "Madonna of the Maquiladora" is part social conscience, part moral warning, and part something else, something odd and simultaneously dense and specific and airily, eerily fantastic: a quality that John Kessel, who wrote the book’s Afterword, calls "Social Surrealism." "Frost tells certain hard truths about America," Kessel argues, and in "Madonna of the Maquiladora," Frost keeps pace with the times, casting his piercing glance at Mexico, which has effectively become part of the U.S. economy through NAFTA.
The poor in our own streets are not ignored. In "The Bus," Frost assesses -- with imagery and vocabulary that are cold and exacting -- the fact that the wealthy, and those who aspire to be wealthy, essentially consume the poor, pushing them out of society and into the role of living fossil fuel, the residue of a system that requires disparity to function. This is not simply the fate of individuals: families, too, suffer, unraveling in "Collecting Dust" into ashes and soot, their essential life energies drained by a world where human frailty, like so many other weaknesses that fail to fatten the bottom line, is a fatal liability.
But not every story is darkness harsh and unrelieved. Frost has a sense of humor too, and after the book’s opening volleys the reader discovers, with no small relief, the comic gifts the author bears in stories like "Touring Jesusworld" and "The Road to Recovery." The former is a shrewd first-person narration by a news reporter having a look at a theme park dedicated to the probable facts pertaining to the life of the historical, as opposed to the mythic, Jesus. The owner of the park is well intentioned, but has no grasp of the true nature of religious faith and its immunity to trivial matters like facts or even sense. In a supreme twist, it is ultimately this self-same naïf who conceives a fresh modern gospel and foresees the future of faith -- you just have to read it to believe that Frost pulls this story off. The latter is a galactic road movie: "Recovery" is a planet being terraformed by a lethally self-involved lunatic named Cathorius, into whose mad little fiefdom two wise-cracking scalawags stumble, spouting one liners as naturally as they draw breath. (Commenting on stolen clothing, one of them says, "Even I know better than to wear stripes with a checkered past.") The story is a marvel of puns, literary references, and, almost buried beneath the madcap antics of it all, a surprisingly strong sci-fi notion that Michael Crichton would have been proud to have invented.
There are a couple of near-misses in the volume, most notably two semi-vampire tales. "The Girlfriends of Dorian Gray" has a lighter touch than many of the other stories, but it’s not exactly comedy, nor satire, nor drama; the Dorian Gray angle is tenuous, too, since the villain of the piece relies on an enchanted ring, rather than a painting, and it’s not wrinkles and liver spots that he transfers, but calories and pounds. By magically channeling his huge feasts to his "vessel" of the moment -- always a woman, of course, which provides what satire the story does possess -- Dorian (the author never names the character except in the title, so maybe that really is supposed to be who he is) stays slim and eats to his heart’s content -- until he meets a woman who proves more than is match. The story is unsettlingly similar to a Norman Spinrad concoction called "The Fat Vampire," and while comparisons are unfair, they are inevitable; Spinrad’s take on women inheriting the gluttonous sins of men is fuller, funnier, and more roundly capped off. "Some Things Are Better Left" leaves unsaid the most crucial element of any story -- the ending -- and while this is a bold innovation (and an inspired one, insofar as the idea seems to be to let the reader supply the outcome and the explanation for a an ageless man whose eternal youth is potentially the result of vampirism or, equally likely, of voodoo), it leaves you feeling denied rather than simply teased.
Most of these stories are important; the collection as a whole certainly merits attention. Stories in which the old South is hammered by a mysterious rain of gigantic jazz instruments don’t come along too often, and when they do they make a music you simply cannot ignore. Frost is the sort of writer who will not always engage your sympathy, but he will, without exception, involve your brain.
by Gregory Frost
Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press. Publication Date: June 15, 2005. Pages: 344. Price: $25.95. ISBN 1-930846-34-7
