Aliens, Minibikes and Other Staples of Suburbia [Paperback]

M. F. Korn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2001

Welcome to the America of your childhood fantasies. When traveling carnivals came and left seemingly overnight, when the fish your father caught was related to dinosaurs, and when that strange animal you found in the ditch obviously was a space alien.

In this collection of stories, return to the land of innocence and imagination. Prepare to laugh, to be scared senseless, and above all, to remember what it was like when a simple towel around your neck made you the greatest superhero of them all.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Unfortunately, Danny's father meant well, but he ruined Danny forever by buying a metal-framed treehouse kit. To make matters worse, he put it together while Danny sat idly by. Where is justice? Who is the loser by this tragedy? I built a crooked, unplumbed mess on a dying elm tree in the middle of the backyard. It truly was a thing of beauty. A few beams of two-by-fours going this way and that, with a slapped on piece of plywood here and there to sit upon to survey the domain. My luncheon meat sandwiches were devoured in that very place. A perch for vigilant wholesome kids. Take Davey Smithson's treefort, for example. Endless packs of cigarettes and nudie books were stashed in his insidious den of iniquity. We would have none of that surliness. No sirree. We were fighting for truth, justice, and the American way, just like Superman the way he was drawn by DC Comics before he became invulnerable to Kryptonite. Mercury and Jupiter had no particular vices per se, with the exception of watching too much Saturday morning television and being really partial to Gigantor. We were on the cusp of the tail end of the sixties. It was a good time to be a kid. Of course, almost anytime is a good time to be a kid if you're as lucky as we were. The phosphor images of test patterns were followed by such illuminating programs on early Saturday (or Sunday) morning as Across the Fence and The Louisiana Agriculture and Farm Report before the likes of Looney Tunes or the rugged pouty face of Popeye would show up in the remake of Arabian Nights and WWII propaganda cartoons with caricatured jap-teethed soldiers getting clobbered when Popeye got his junkie strength fix of raw canned spinach. Hundreds, thousands of kids all across America were subsisting on a proper diet of cartoons in black-and-white and color both. Our minds reeled with action figures and GI Joe submarine and frogman equipment. I had two GI Joe equipment army chests filled with every sort of stiletto, army rifle, pistol. How many times did I roam Sears and Wilson's department store, looking for every accessory for our fighting man? My two sisters had Barbie and Ken and Mystery Date games. My forte was more of a Stratego, Risk arrangement. Monopoly was for everyone and crossed all lines. How could one resist not popping the dice scrambler bubble one more time just for that extra "pop"? Geographies of dollhouses and little trolls and tie-died t-shirts and swinger cameras enfolded our quarters. Our biggest superheroic adventure, besides the ones we lived through vicariously through Marvel and DC comic books, was attacking a villain named Johnny Love. Johnny Love was about twenty years old and at least two hundred pounds. He was just the friendly son of a next door neighbor who tripped through his heritage of Lovin' Spoonful and Strawberry Alarm Clock. We came into his villainous past right at the skewed corner of Danny's father's house. He was caught unawares, and we grappled with this demonic righteous nemesis until we couldn't take it anymore, or when he got a pit peeved and we ran away. Collections of comic books are treasure troves. I had everything from Little Lulu to Baby Huey to serious literature like Classics Illustrated and X-men. The folded and rumpled remained for quite some time. Dogeared Doc Savage and torn Conan the Barbarian paperbacks were in the realm. Danny and Johhny Haroldson and I all subsisted on a diet of these, along with Doc Smith's Lensman series. As hearty and brilliant as we were rocket scientists, we were also men of letters. We tried to submit a story to Analog. The story went as follows: a brilliant race of aliens were hunting a lesser-known species across galaxies for sheer pleasure. I don't remember how it came out, but we never sent it. Needless to say, Ben Bova, the editor of Analog, didn't seem to miss it any. Daredevil, Hulk, Silver Surfer were all our myths and truths. We enacted our baser instincts of noble savagery on campouts and tentouts. Many a doorbell was rung on the basis of sheer deviltry. Lightpoles were clanged with obtrusive sticks until porch lights came on suddenly. And we went our merry way into the long eternal night. We read reams of Mad Magazines by flashlight. Renditions of prank phone calls erupted along invisible lines through the ether. Cracked Magazines were not my style, really, but give me Don Martin's cartoons and Mort Drucker and the world was a bit better. Girls were a preponderance of our mighty thinking in those times. Aroused by cuteness, I formed the most intense crushes upon the most cherubic fawns of femalia that one could imagine. The inked sirens, nymphs, and maidens were also ones to be partial to. Bodacious, voluptuous, smooth-thighed amazon creatures oozing sweetness across a bordered ink-dotted page or two were the acumen of sexuality for a wholesome group of boys. Costumed beauties graced comic covers with buxom essence. That was literally our universe. Boyhood was good in those early years. Kids still wanted BB guns, go carts, but add to that now, Beatles albums for the rebellious. Lawn darts and Frisbees for the gamers. Lego blocks for the plodders. Erector sets for the engineers. Footballs for the jocks. Comic books for the dreamers. Summer days of languid heat with the hurlings of basketballs and playground weeds sprouting all over second base in brutal twin suns of Krypton. Pet dogs that, in lieu of chasing cars, could slightly resemble Superdog, only if we could attach that cape. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Silver Lake Pub (November 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931095272
• ISBN-13: 978-1931095273
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.2 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,541,609 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

MF Korn writes surreal dark fantasy, quiet horror and strange science fiction. He is the author of twelve novels, two screenplays and two hundred and forty five short stories.

Three of Michael Korn's books, CONFESSIONS OF A GHOUL AND OTHER STORIES, and ALIENS, MINIBIKES AND OTHER STAPLES OF SUBURBIA, and SKIMMING THE GUMBO NUCLEAR were mentioned in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Fifteenth Annual Edition.

CONFESSIONS OF A GHOUL AND OTHER STORIES and RACHMANINOFF'S GHOST were mentioned in The Mammoth Book of New Horror.

A story "The Strange Case of the Lovecraft Cafe" cowritten with D.F. Lewis and Jeff Vandermeer was mentioned in the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Twenty First Annual Edition. His website is www.mfkorn.com .

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Blurbs, May 28, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Aliens, Minibikes and Other Staples of Suburbia (Paperback)

"While reading, you'll be picked up and dropped straight into your own history while visiting various, imaginary neighborhoods...It's nostalgia at its finest."
--Sherry Decker, from the Introduction

"M. F. Korn's richly detailed, highly idiosyncratic portraits of America call to mind a Bradbury on magic mushrooms...he's a Norman Rockwell speaking in tongues with a voodoo doll in one hand and a flaming paintbrush in the other." --Jeffrey Thomas, author of Punktown

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A reader passing along a review from NECROFILE, August 12, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Aliens, Minibikes and Other Staples of Suburbia (Paperback)

Personal aside author information, then review:
-------------------------------------

About MF Korn,author of twelve novels and 240 stories published:

Three of MF Korn's books, CONFESSIONS OF A GHOUL AND OTHER STORIES, and ALIENS, MINIBIKES AND OTHER STAPLES OF SUBURBIA, and also SKIMMING THE GUMBO NUCLEAR were mentioned in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection. CONFESSIONS OF A GHOUL AND OTHER STORIES was mentioned in The Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror edited by Stephen Jones. RACHMANINOFF'S GHOST was also mentioned in The Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror edited the following year.
----------------------------------------------------------------

(Here is Necropsy review below)

Forget the Beef Clara-Where's the Plot Line?
by Tony Fonseca


Korn, M. F. Aliens, Minibikes, and Other Staples of Suburbia. Morton, PA: Silver Lake Publishing, 2001. 110 p.
Childhood fears have always made good horror fare. Fictions that play upon these, our earliest and pehaps most universal anxieties, are rife with grotesque creations of the collective unconscious of children: they are populated with evil clowns (Stephen King's It), eerie elementary schools (Dan Simmons' Summer of Night), and muderous imaginary friends (the magician of Brandon Massey's Thunderland). With his new collection, Aliens, Minibikes, and Other Staples of Suburbia, M. F. Korn attempts to play upon a different type of childhood fear-the fear of being consumed by the greyness of suburban life, especially for teen ages boys.

Although Aliens, Minibikes, and Other Staples contains nine diverse stories, the collection is a thinly disguised vehicle for its title piece, "Aliens and Minibikes," a short novella about a group of misfit boys who discover a dog-like stranded alien while hunting for golf balls, and later adopt the alien as a pet. Unfortunately, "Aliens and Minibikes" takes up about two-thirds of the collection, while more interesting tales about freak show carnivals that kidnap children to make them into future "carnies" and fishermen who land 150 million year old reptilian fish are not developed beyond the raw conception stage.

In fact, the best three tales, or I should call them ideas or story boards, are the first three in the collection: "The Spectral Carnival Show," "How Soothing Are My Anachronisms," and "Catch of the Century." Each of these tales is potentially more unsettling and grotesque than "Aliens and Minibikes," but each reads more like an outline for a story than a complete story. Korn presents readers with interesting scenarios, such a gift shop where one can purchase anachronistic paraphenalia such as a video of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or a photo of Christ hanging at Calvary, but he fails to flesh out these ideas with a developing plot line or even interesting characterizations. Although clever musings can be entertaining and even valuable, they cannot in and of themselves be the basis for decent literature. A good story needs time to develop, and time seems to be something that Korn did not put into eight of the nine tales in this collection.

The one truly fleshed out piece, "Aliens and Minibikes," is less eerie than it is introspective, as it is concerned with growing up in the suburbs during the 1970s. Its main character, Kern, is a misunderstood teen whose sense of reality is informed as much by television and popular culture as it is by the world of his Sherwood Forrest neighborhood (there actually is such a neighborhood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the city where most of Korn's works are set). Kern and his friends discover a smallish injured alien creature one afternoon, and the story tells of their attempts to incorporate this newfound knowledge of the cosmos into their realities. Where a more seasoned writer like King would have created a tale concerned with the boys' need to protect their new knowledge and perhaps nurse the creature back to health, Korn makes the mistake of allowing his plot to move too quickly, so that soon the boys' fathers and older brothers are involved in the "what to do about the alien" plot. This is where "Aliens and Minibikes" completely falls apart. Korn's adults see the alien creature and even recognize its otherworldliness, and then go right about their lives as if they'd just seen a stray cat. To say this makes absolutely no sense would be a gross understatement.

Reading Aliens, Minibikes, and Other Staples of Suburbia, I get the impression that Korn could write an interesting story-if he were to take the time to think out the implications of his fictional realities and were to follow the winding trails that his fictional worlds necessitate that his characters travel along. However, these stories seem to have been composed in haste, as if their writer couldn't get them out of his head and into a word processor fast enough, and as if their writer simply wanted to call them finished, despite the fact that they were in no way polished or complete. I would personally like to see Korn take the three first tales of this collection and flesh them out into longer pieces, complete with characters, a plot line, rising and falling action, a climax....the whole literary bit. Experimental fiction can work, and can even be quite good, but even literary mainstays John Barth and Donald Barthelme, and in the genre Nancy Kilpatrick and Kathe Koja, had to master the form of the story before they chose to break with that form. This may be something that Korn, a writer who really has yet to find his voice, will have to learn in time.