Silver Linings
I didn’t realize when I was “let go” from my job of many years that it would be the best gift someone had ever given me. So it was easy for me to tell my friend, Bill Lavender, that his “letting go” would be the best thing that could happen to him.
Bill instantly did what Bill should have done a while ago and that is hang his shingle out, or rather dust it off, because Lavender Ink has been a reputable publishing house for a while now.
And so our loss has turned into our gain, because with Bill publishing work again, and giving me an opportunity to read new and interesting work and review it, well, say no more, I think we found our silver linings.
So here’s my review for:
Altercations in the Quiet Car
by Richard Martin
Somewhere on a couch, on a chair, on the porch, on the stair is a man who thinks too much. The man lives in “a world full of questions without answers.” This is not your average taciturn male, but a loquacious, disturbed and disturbing, insightful and delusional man for the ages. And Richard Martin’s Altercations in the Quiet Car has 44 plus male characters like this who pop off the page as if you just walked up and asked them for a light.
In most of these stories, the man in question or the questioning man has partnered with a super model babe whose boundaries are so clearly delineated that they appear to have all gone to the same university for learning how not to suffer these types of men.
The pace of the stories makes you want to read one after another, but they are best read one a night, for 44 nights, and once you have spent some six and a half weeks in Martin’s orbit you realize there is nobody quiet in the Quiet Car.
Caution: re-entry into a world filled with quiet men may not be possible.