Other Voices, Other Doors | ||||||||
Patrick O'Leary | ||||||||
Fairwood Press, 200 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Rich Horton
I said O'Leary seems to be a novelist primarily. This is, for the most part, reflected in the stories, which are built
on clever or scary ideas but many of which don't quite work for me. They are still worth reading; they buzz with
neat images and nice wordplay, and a few are better than that. My favourite was "Before and After," a very
different mainstream story about a married man, shortly after the birth of his first child, who starts to frequent a strip club.
Eventually, he finds his way to an unexpected "private room," and learns something about sex and responsibility:
before and after. "23 Skidoo" is intriguing as well. It's another take on the idea behind Door Number Three:
aliens visiting Earth in human bodies. And "The Problem Phone" is by turns funny and clever, about a new phone with
a very special service.
The essays are passionate work, and very well done. O'Leary promotes some of his favourite artists: Randy Newman,
Van Morrison, Gene Wolfe, and Spider Robinson. These aren't routine criticism, either, but nice imaginative pieces,
building for example on the Book of Job for the Newman piece, and on the Wizard of Oz for the Wolfe piece. He also
touches on politics, and he discusses the genesis of some of his fiction. Plus there is a neat sketch about the right
way to respond to a critic. (Hmmm, maybe I better be a little more effusive in my praise!)
Finally, I was pretty impressed by the poetry. It's very sound contemporary poetry, almost always interesting, and
in a couple of instances really striking. I particularly liked "You You Were Naked," "Somewhere Like Leonardo" and
the self-referential "This is a Poem."
As I said, on the evidence O'Leary is at his best at novel length (or writing poetry). The short stories here are
decent, sometimes rather better, but not always wholly successful. The essays are fine, and the poetry quite good -- this
is a book worth having, but get the novels first, if you haven't found them already. And it's worth mentioning that
this is the first trade paperback from Fairwood Press, the fine folks who publish Talebones: it's always nice
to see another publisher trying to keep short fiction in print.
Rich Horton is an eclectic reader in and out of the SF and fantasy genres. He's been reading SF since before the Golden Age (that is, since before he was 13). Born in Naperville, IL, he lives and works (as a Software Engineer for the proverbial Major Aerospace Company) in St. Louis area and is a regular contributor to Tangent. Stop by his website at http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton. |
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