Customer Reviews

100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories

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100 Jolts is a book comprised of what is called "Flash Fiction", a type of very brief fiction pieces that has gained a lot of popularity in the computerized publishing age. When reading online magazines, one does not want to scroll forever, and the eyes will tire; which is where flash fiction lights up to its best advantage.

Whether calling it Flash Fiction or Minimalist Horror, 100 Jolts is a shockingly delightful romp through some very sticky, and very slimy, situations. Michael Arnzen clearly demonstrates that he has been working with Flash for some time, showing off these bereft-poetry-haiku type of "smack you in the face" stories with style and substance.

We have all occasionally read those droll books where an author takes a 50 page story and pads it into 500 pages of tedious reading, and 100 Jolts is the exact opposite of those snooze fests. In this book, there is the sense that a 50 page story has been pared down past the meat into the skeletal frame and left us quivering with the ringing of steel on bone, as Arnzen slices off the juiciest of the story just for us, handing it out to us on a tiny platter, a toothy grin gracing his face.

Well, eat up, boys and girls! 100 Jolts is one of the best collections of this new type of fiction I have seen yet. There were a few pieces that left me disappointed, having the feeling of a muse or a simply jotted idea, but the rest of this thin volume left my hunger satisfied and my mind whirling with the impact, exactly how the author intended.

And for those of us with a warped or twisted sense of humor, you will find a chuckle or two lurking here also.
Some of my favorites include: Skull Fragments, Take Out, Stabbing For Dummies, White Out, The Seven Headed Beast, Psycho Hunter, Inside The Man With No Eyelids, Burning Bridges, Next Door, Nightmare Job #3, Five Mean Machines, The Eight Ball In Big Mouth's Pocket, An Evil Eye, The Blood Ran Out, How To Grow A Man Eating Plant, and Domestic Fowl.

Those are just a tiny sampling of the works collected here. With stories ranging from two or three sentences to two or three pages, this book is perfect for a beach afternoon, a late night flight, or a nice little story before bedtime.

Enjoy!

In his introduction, author Michael Arnzen states that "Horror is the genre of the jolt, the shock, the spark." To prove his point, he then offers up one hundred short stories to his audience, the longest, "Five Mean Machines," only nine pages in length (many are only one paragraph long), each designed with the idea of creating an immediate, visceral reaction in readers. It's a measure of Arnzen's talent that he more often than not achieves this goal, all without losing sight of a couple basic tenets of storytelling, those being to grab and hold your reader, and maybe make him think in the bargain. Despite the limits he's imposed on himself, Arnzen still proves capable of doing just that in little gems like "Nightmare Job #1" through "Nightmare Job #5" (think of it as a mini miniseries), "The Curse of Fat Face," and "Her Daily Bread." One warning before you begin 100 Jolts, though--like the candy in a Whitman sampler, you'll find yourself gobbling up one tale after another. Not a big problem, until you abruptly come to the end, still craving more. You might consider exerting some willpower, and force yourself to sample these varied delights over several days, thus maximizing their impact.

This book is fantastic. Arnzen takes ideas that lesser authors would stretch out over 500 pages and slams them down in remarkably short, yet complete, stories. Arnzen succeeds in doing what I have been attempting to do my entire life. He scares the hell out of people.

"Flash fiction," by nature of its brevity, needs to be evocative and often must point outside the world of each story to achieve the full effect. As a happy coincidence, one of the strategies that makes horror fiction so effective can be the hinted-at moments that the author never makes explicit--the moments that might even be too horrible to imagine. With 100 JOLTS, Michael Arnzen offers an original, unique collection of "shockingly short stories" that beautifully exploits this connection between horror and the unsaid, the unimaginable.

There's a nice rhythm to the book that really pulls the reader in, a shifting between humor and straightforward horror--you never know quite what to expect. The writing is so nicely compressed here that it has the feel of a MUCH larger collection: a flash story as Arnzen conceives it definitely has the same impact as a full short story. This is a fantastic, unique collection of stories. Highly recommended.

Currently, Michael A. Arnzen is one of the least known horror writers around. However, if he keeps writing books like 100 Jolts, he will eventually become as famous as the likes of Clive Barker and Stephen King.

One very easily gets the impression that Arnzen really enjoyed writing the stories that are in 100 Jolts since he clearly delights in scaring his readers to death. The amazing thing about 100 Jolts is that every single one of its stories sends a shock straight to the brain.

100 Jolts is a book that deserves to garner major consideration next year when the horror awards are decided on. This is precisely the kind of literate horror that the genre is in need of.

100 Jolts is a superb collection of short shocking fiction, packing punch after punch after punch. Arnzen's ability to tell a complete story - with a beginning, middle, and end - in so few words is nothing shy of amazing. Intelligent, poetic, ironic, Jolts delivers.

100 Jolts is an excellect collection of stories. From three sentences to a few pages, each story is a tasty morsel of horror. A modern day writer of the Poe variety, Arnzen's words are served up on a delicious platter full of shock and delight.

The stories will chill you. More than anything, they will make your skin crawl long after you've read it. I would absolutely recommend it to both horror writer and reader alike.

Short, sharp and definitely shocking. Whatever your taste in horror, '100 Jolts' will have a story for you. Intensively strong in style and content, highly addictive narrative. Arnzen gives horror again and again in bite sized shorts - you won't want to put it down.

Highly recommended.

One stormy night...well, it wasn't stormy, but six of us did stay up all night, taking turns reading these flashes of horror. Everyone had their own favorite. I fluctuated between 'Stretch' (which few people can read all in one breath) and 'Brain Candy' (which is so good it's used as a back cover blurb).

It's also great to read with a flashlight around a campfire.

Of course, now that some of these were made into the movie EXQUISITE CORPSE, you can see some of the images inspired by the book. (With the lights out, of course.)

Michael Arnzen's 100 Jolts is a must for all readers and writers alike. Arnzen uses the language to create beautiful images that are sometime funny, sometimes sad, often gross, and always original. Stories can be enjoyed at the surface or you can delve deeper to find more meaning. At only a few hundred words a piece (or much less in some cases), this is remarkable. It shows us that horror writing can be tight and poignant and literary despite the "bad rap" that horror often gets.

The only way this book could have been better is if it were titled 10,000 Jolts.