Country: USA
Genre: Noir
Pages: 270/315 kb
Order A F*CKLOAD OF SHORTS here
Hey, I'll own it; I've never been a big music fan. I couldn't tell you the names of the guys in Led Zeppelin and I don't know which of the Beatles is still alive or who exactly Nick Jagger was. All I can say is, when I saw the footage of that crackeron TV with the tight jeans and sunglasses, making sex to that guitar, so full of fight and life, and then pictured that he was dead? Maybe I cried a little.
If you ever get involved in the crime fiction community, you will sooner or later meet Jedidiah Ayres. He is an excruciatingly tall person from noirist capital of St-Louis, Missouri and also a master at making things happen. He organized countless Noir @ Bar event, produced two anthologies from the aforementioned booze-soaked reading and helped to keep afloat Subterranean Books by doing that. My point is that he's a very tall and good person, on surface. Whenever he's left alone with a keyboard and the glow of a computer screen at the wee hours of the morning, an evil midget takes over his body. Maybe it's a troll, I don't know. But Jedediah Ayres' dark passenger writes the most perverted, foul, sick and deranged stories. They also happen to be excellent for these very reasons. A F*CKLOAD OF SHORTS is a gateway into Jedediah Ayres' world, a place where the future is the present and if you don't have what it takes to kill your neighbor, you're unlikely to succeed. Kind of like a Sodom A.D.
Most Ayres fans are familiar by now with MAHOGANY & MONOGAMY and A FUCKLOAD OF SCOTCH TAPE, the two epic, mirror stories that could arguably be sold as one novella. Both are brutal pieces of fiction, telling the ins-and-outs of Benji's big money score. Think Alexandre Dumas, mixed with James Ellroy and add a lot of inland violence. My favorite story though (and I think everybody's favorite story) is HOOSIER DADDY, first published in Beat to a Pulp. It's the insane tale of Carl, who allowed himself to be weak and sentimental with the wrong girl and let the demons of jealousy take over. In the strange logic of Ayres' world, you feel empathy for Carl, even that he's entitled to these feeling, because his competition isn't exactly fair. His newfound love wasn't really looking for a "man" in the proper sense of the term. I laughed out loud at the desperate final line. I think it was intended by the author.
The master plan behind the success of Jedidiah Ayres' stories isn't complicated, but it's both a feat in precision and artistic vision. Let me explain. Most bleak/noir stories are all the same. A guy walks into a bar, everybody's depressed and there's a big score for money offered and the depressed protagonist accepts, because he doesn't care about anything anymore. But in A F*CKLOAD OF SHORTS, Jedidiah Ayres mixes and matches the variables, just to see what happens. The depressed protagonist becomes stupid, the bar becomes a titty bar with manipulative strippers with daddy issues, the shady characters are all gay or have an infatuation with old rock n' roll. It's the tiny, vibrant, sensory details that make these stories stand out and in that regards, Ayres isn't unlike Raymond Chandler, who also carefully chose his setting variables for maximum effect. But he's a Chandler with a perverted sense of humor.
Susie Dross had a husband, you might say, though I wouldn't. I've been one before and let me tell you, any emasculation I may have suffered at the hands of my various ex's would merely feel lik tight pants compared to the continual and public nut flaying Herbert Dross took up as his daily cross. She may as well have kept his testes ties to either end of a baton and twirled the motherfucker in front of a bras band everywhere they went together.
I haven't yet seen the movie adaptation of Ayres' crime epic Mahogany/Fuckload, but now that I understand his universe a little better, I'm dying to. There is nothing in the whole literary landscape that is like Jedidiah Ayres does. There are no criminals like his simple-minded, romantic misfits and no place like his working class settings, full of people who want to take advantage of each other. If you make a good decision and put your hands on this, also check out THE WHOLE BUFFALO, MIRIAM and AMATEURS, who are all worth the (low) price of admission too. Sharp, vibrant storytelling and black humor that go way beyond fart jokes is what Jedidiah Ayres offers here. If he was born in Japan, he'd be a superstar alongside the likes of Ryu Murakami and Takashi Miike already. While it's difficult to see him get mainstream success with such fearless, cutting prose, one can only hope Ayres will reach the status that is rightfully his - cult author.
FOUR STARS