when i moved to portland & applied to be a bookseller at powell's, i was by chance interviewed by the woman who managed the gold room. even though i have never liked books like that & still don't. to this end, i took several classes on genre fiction, in order to thoroughly understand the tropes of your average western novel or sci-fi book. which seems weird to me now that i never watch movies, but okay. when i was in college, one of my several majors was popular culture, with an emphasis on the inter-relationship of cinema & literature. by which i mean, westerns, mysteries, fantasy, old-school pulp novels, & items that can be found in the gold room at powell's in portland, oregon. i'm sure this is a great anthology for people who do like genre fiction. Avoid.ĭo you like genre fiction? then read this book. Nice one Chabon for editing the weakest issue of McSweeney's ever. It was ironically thrilling in that it wasn't at all. I'd read Neil Gaiman and Nick Hornby's contributions before and liked Hornby's so I felt like I'd read a good enough chunk of the book to get the gist of it. The rest, including the other big name - Glen David Gold, Elmore Leonard, Harlan Ellison, Dave Eggers - didn't fill me with confidence given the output so far.
Michael Chabon and Rick Moody both supply 70 page stories and having read both writers' previous work I knew I wouldn't like them. I stopped at that point realising there were 400 pages left! 400 pages of potentially more soul crushing tedium.
Amazingly, this story wasn't hard boiled like the genre it sets out to represent and was utterly dreary. It's literally a story about a metal plate.Ī week later, I picked another famous writer, Michael Crichton, and his story "Blood Doesn't Come Out" a story about a private detective who shoots his mother. Going for a more well known writer I picked up with Stephen King's "The Tale of Gray Dick", a story set in his Dark Tower world. I put the book down for several days out of boredom. Yup, that's the opening salvo that's supposed to have you clutching the book feverishly. Jim Shepard opens with a story called "Tedford and the Megalodon", a snoozer about a guy who goes looking for a prehistoric fish (I think anyway, I was so bored I drifted in and out) and ultimately finds it only to have it swim away. Big name writers try to write genre pulp fiction from the '30s and '40s and the results are dire. Like the cover and the way the stories are presented, the title "Thrilling Tales" is an ironic smirk at the content.
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