Customer Reviews

Banjo Grease

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The characters in Dennis Must's delicious new collection of short stories are so realistic and eerily familiar that they seem to leap from the book and sit down next to the reader. Must has captured the essence of a strata of humanity who are almost perfect in their imperfections. These are fully three dimensional people who one hopes to meet again. How wonderful that we have this writer among us. I look forward eagerly to future work by Must.

From the opening line of the first story, "Escape," to the closing of "Oh Josephine," Dennis Must links together stories of the ordinary and not so ordinary among us, and does so in a manner that not only engages the reader, but creates a camaraderie between his delightfully eccentric characters and his audience.

This line, from "The Scar," was worth the entire book: "But this massive sliding soul was a sweetness at the edge of sour." A very satisfying line that, among countless others.

Along the journey, Must makes us laugh, empathize, gape in comic horror, and most important, keep reading.

Banjo Grease is a revelation. A series of literary narratives that cheats--because unlike most literary literature of today, this book is most entertaining and keeps the reader's attention to the end. Dennis Must rivals Bukowski in his irreverence and challenges Thom Jones in his pure talent to relate life's darker side with class. Read this book and learn what literary writing should be. I salute the author.

In his debut collection of short stories, "Banjo Grease," Dennis Must chronicles the daily grind, the familial relationships, and the dysfunction of life in a small blue-collar town. His characters are uneducated and often crass, his narrators are refreshingly straightfoward and honest, and the whole bunch of them are often humorous in a down-home sort of way. You just can't help but like them - most of them anyway.

The collection is loosely held together by the character of Westley Daugherty, a young man growing up in the town of Hebron, Pennsylvania, whose voice becomes the reader's comfort zone as we meet him again and again throughout the book. We follow him through ten of the sixteen stories, as he chronicles the experiences of his life, always focusing on various members of his family. Must's greatest strength lies in his talent for description and he uses it to define his characters and their surroundings in a way that gives us the truth of their lives before they utter a single word. In the title story, "Banjo Grease", young Westley tells us about his Aunt Min:

"Like the lid of a can, the trailer door slowly opened. A sweet and stale odor rose out of its aperture. Min suddenly appeared, her henna shoe-polished hair curled in scraps of toilet paper with metal rollers the size of silverdollar wrappers. Her rouged cheeks, splotched and smeared, sinking in towards her mouth - upper and lower dentures back in a jar at bedside, soaking."

With his sensitivity to detail, an inherent understanding of his characters, and a conversational style that is infused with the basic motions of every day existence, Must makes us intimate with this working-class society which he obviously has a great affection for. Here, we are introduced to Buddy Hart and his Uncle in "Say Hello to Stanley," arguably the best short story in the collection:

"Buddy Hart hauled the Hammond B-3 in a two-wheel trailer hitched to his father's Willys sedan. The family thought Uncle Stanley's talent as a barrel-house pianist had by some mysterious route passed down to Bud. And the miracle became even more fortuitous when Stanley lost two of his fingers in the cutting mill along with his gig."

Most of the stories are not feel-good pieces. These folks live difficult, confused lives. There are dreams unfulfilled, marriages in trouble, death to deal with, family members to be ashamed of. It's the stuff that life is made of, and yet, Must's characters are as unique as they are universal. That's part of what makes them so successful.

"Banjo Grease" is a hearty and satisfying glimpse into the heart of americana. Individually, these short stories are good; as a collection, they emerge as a fine artistic achievement.