Customer Reviews

American Morons

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I don't mean to be a pest, but the first story in Hirshberg's collection, "American Morons," almost made me put it down. It's not that I'm easily offended---quite the contrary. And it isn't because I love traveling in Europe and resent the tale. No, it was for neither of these reasons. Instead, it was because it seemed so stereotypical. It wasn't until I kept trucking along with his collection that I realized what he was trying to do: scare the crap out of the audience with nothing more than the mundane.
It was "Safety Clowns" that made me write this review. I'm a writer, too. We don't get much credit for the things we create. Anymore, no one notices the complicated nuances of a nice metaphor or the proper usage of the word "its". So I wanted to give Hirshberg the credit his writing deserves. From the get-go in "Safety Clowns," I knew something was wrong about the ice cream salesmen in the story. It was the so-called cockroaches clinging to the sides of the trucks that gave it away.
Hirshberg does this in all the stories in his collection: he turns normal, everyday situations and characters into things to be feared. And trust me, I was fearing. Sitting in my bed, reading yet another story right before a night of restful slumber, I was basically signing up for nightmares. Then, the last one--"The Muldoon"--uggggrrrrhhhh. Wow. Scared the living crap out of me, and I loved every minute.
If you liked Stephen King's "Everything's Eventual," you'll love this collection.

Just a few years after The Two Sams, his first short story collection, Glen Hirshberg is back with a new great collection of stories. Yes, these are ghost stories, but there is more here as Mr. Hirshberg also used some more mainstream suspense here, always with the same great quality of writing style. I do agree with Peter Straub when he says that Glen Hirshberg is one of the best writers of weird fiction of his generation. There is nothing more to say except here with this book you go from one good surprise to another all along the pages. A good trip full of memorable steps. Enjoy!

Glen Hirshberg is the reincarnation of Shirley Jackson, that writer of psychologically creepy books like We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House. When Jackson died in 1965, the Earth was stripped of a horror writer whose greatest horror is reality, who doesn't just know but feels, as Jackson declared in Hill House, "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." Imagine the sighs of hippopotami in slow rivers and barely sentient babies sensing an inarticulable loss when Jackson died. But--Nature replenishes herself. Just months after Jackson's death, Glen Hirshberg was born, and like Jackson's, his characters resort to fantasies in order to survive their realities. Hirshberg even takes a cue from Jackson's larks and katydids. In American Morons, loons, peacocks, and spiders seem to be in their own little nightmares.
See how I'm dwelling on Jackson more than Hirshberg? This is what Hirshberg does best-- he deflects. In each story, there's the real heart of darkness and then there's the trappings, the near-red herrings: the death cry of peacocks, jasmine tea pods unfurling like spiders' legs, a carnival song that seeps into the brain, lifelike dolls made of seaweed and shells, two dead women's dresses clinging to each other, the cockroach-like mouths of an ice cream truck. Hirshberg sends an ice cream man out in a van and suddenly sunny So Cal turns into that dark valley through which you must not walk... But the horrors these trappings mask are plainer and also more haunting: Americans stranded in the breakdown lane of the Italian Superstrade at a time when anti-American sentiment has reached a fever pitch in the title story "American Morons"; the purposelessness of retired teachers in "Transitway"; desiring salvation yet refusing to believe in it in "Like a Lily in the Flood"; mourning a dead lover in "The Devil's Smile"; or living in the house you grew up in after your parents have died in "Safety Clowns."
The best stories merge the set piece and the personal horrors. "The Muldoon" has three ghosts (or none-- Hirshberg is tricky): two hags left to rot in their beds and a sainted grandfather whose grandsons sit shiva for him. After the two gruesome deaths, a critical accident, and a revelation about the grandfather, it's the ghost of the grandsons' relationship that stays with me longest: "...I watched my brother. The moonlight seemed to pour over him in layers, coating him, so that with each passing moment he grew paler." Then there is the Hawthornesque "Like a Lily in a Flood," about a man revisiting the New England inn where his parents died, and the story he hears about Thoreau's laundrywoman. Not wanting to give away the ending-- and unsure which thread is the real horror and which is the red herring-- I'll say that ultimately, the only otherworldly aspect seems to be the specter of the laundrywoman's mind.
While his stories certainly skirt the supernatural, Hirshberg never actually invents a new world, species or specter. His horror, like Jackson's, is psychological. His snowballing sentences and beguiling settings might make you believe that the real danger is something other than human relationships, and in so lovingly fooling his readers, he makes us resemble the morons of the title.

I hate to write a negative review, especially of an author who is clearly very talented, but I have no idea how this can be categorized as "horror". I'm no Koontz or King fan, I very much enjoy subtlety in horror fiction, (Ramsey Campbell is a favorite) but there must be at least a little reward for slogging through page after page of build-up. I find it impossible to be disturbed on any level by stories of well-to-do couples arguing or slightly depressed protagonists wondering why they are unfulfilled. (This is vast simplification on my part, but I feel it's generally accurate.) Just imagine if you bought a John Irving novel because everyone told you how terrifying his writing was. I was duped into buying this book based on reviews comparing it to Thomas Ligotti & Laird Barron. (The darkest & most powerfully disturbing horror authors I've ever read, who can also be very subtle.) Instead, I got one of the most overwritten, under-plotted, unscary, & generally pointless "horror" collection I've ever had the misfortune of wasting my time on. People who find Peter Straub's meanderings to be "terrifying" rejoice - now there's another author who takes his lack of suspense & narrative drive to the next level. (Sorry folks, but I find GHOST STORY to be the most insultingly unscary & overrated novel of all time.) This of course is not to slight Mr. Hirshberg's talent as a writer - he's very evocative, but has no talent for scaring someone who has experienced more than just a housebound life. Many will enjoy his work, just don't call it horror!

The stories in this collection do not impress me all that much. I find that the author has some good ideas but, as in the title story, tries too hard to put different elements together in order to achieve his objectives. The overall quality of the writing is OK, but very distracting at times, giving me the sense of gliding over the stories without being able to go into them at any depth. I don't care about the characters, the plots meander, and the endings have little or no impact. Not recommended.