Customer Reviews

How Best to Avoid Dying

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a really well done book. like all short story collections, it has some marshy spots. but overall, it's a great read. some funny, some serious, but all very engaging. definately worth the time and money.

I picked this book up because I wanted a break from non-fiction. I am a scientist and always felt I was wasting time if I wasn't reading about science. But I was drawn to this book for some reason. This book made me think and made me feel closer to the human condition. That might sound lame but it is true. Older works of fiction sometimes give you a connection to by-gone times. This book gives you a connection to our times and to one of the sure things in life (... not taxes).

I love this book because I see myself in it. Every single story touched me in some way, in some personal way. If you have dealt with death, or thoughts of mortality then you will also see yourself in this book. Sometimes it is disturbing but it is always funny and often encouraging in a way. Every mortal person should read at least a couple of the stories out of this book. It is dark at times but never depressing. While reading it I got a sense of the courage and a feel for how much thought Egerton put into this. I hope the Reaper has Owen Egerton's sense of humor.

Reviewed by Cherie Fisher of Reader Views (7/07)


Owen Egerton has compiled a book of small stories in "How Best to Avoid Dying." I have to say that I had mixed feelings as I read through some of the stories. It is very difficult to describe my feelings about them as they had the strangest affect on me. I was very disturbed by many of them, but something about them compelled me to read on. I don't think a book has ever had quite that affect on me before. The author is an excellent writer and definitely knows how to draw a reader in.

I often wondered as I was reading "How Best to Avoid Dying" what motivates an author to come up with this brand of writing. Egerton often employed dark humor to get his point across in the stories. He seemed to be poking fun at mankind in an insightful way by writing about human eccentricities. What compels a person to write a book like this? I guess the even bigger question is, what compelled me to not to put it down until I was done?

"How Best to Avoid Dying" primarily explores the painful side of life, and facing up to the realization that we all will die. The book starts with a seemingly innocent spelling bee where the children are eliminated for spelling errors by being dropped through a trap door to meet an awful fate. The strange stories include the author's biblical interpretation of the story of Lazarus to the bizarre summer camp counselor story of the Martyrs of Mountain Peak. Then there was "The Fecalist" -- I will leave the description of this story to your imagination.

Overall, "How Best to Avoid Dying" was very well written and I would recommend it to people who enjoy bizarre stories like the Stephen King and Dean Koontz crowd. I think you will feel like I did at the end of the book - I am still trying to figure out what makes this author tick and think it would be great fun to sit and have an in-depth conversation with him on the meaning of life.

Received book free of charge.

These beautifully crafted, provocative stories keep you both laughing and thinking. Give yourself a real treat.

Rarely do stories complement each other so well as in this bizarre collection, which is at once darkly tragic, hoarsely satirical, exuberantly hilarious, and deeply moving. Egerton's art is driven by a playfulness which rings throughout all these gems, but it far from undercuts the serious. The variety of genres in this volume, from traditional short stories to blistering flash fiction, fairy tales to self-referential annotations, are all peppered with an abundance of moods and attitudes. The stories strike you with horror, form lumps in your throat, and make you smirk. This assortment of style, form, and tone demonstrates Egerton's considerable versatility. And as plated here together, kicking, whirring, and giggling, they make a multi-faceted medley which lingers on the tongue, leaving a bittersweet aftertaste.

Egerton begins with a short absurdist tale about a spelling bee, in a world where such competitions decide the ownership of land masses and the losers, intrepid 8-10 year olds, are dropped into a pit below stage where the audience can watch them slaughtered. Other stories include a Christian camp where counselors encounter fatal "accidents" in twisted attempts to drive the campers towards a life in Christ; an account of a married couple's tepid romantic life and the deeper sexual ambitions and desires embodied in a talking, knighted penis; a look into the life of Lazarus, resurrected by Christ and now living in the modern day, desperate to die; and a girl who niggles the narrator to not kill her off, which closes the volume on a note of poetic gorgeousness. And these are the more traditional ones.

One story, "Holy," is a sparse paragraph. "The Beginning of All Things" is a two-page story about rodents fighting for a Snickers bar that turns into a prose poem creation tale. "The Adventures of Stimp" morphs into a series of run-on sentences, almost stream of consciousness, which portrays absolute devotion between a hamster and his owner. As a whole, these shorter pieces aren't as good as the longer ones. They are excellent examples of Egerton toying with narrative form, always original, and brilliantly carve a small but powerful piece of art in miniature. However, several of them lack the emotional depth of the longer works, and they all are missing a sense of roundedness--minute details injected into the narrative that both flesh out the universe of the story and greatly contribute to its power to move.

These details are subtle and quiet: ornamentations of a master's hand. In Egerton's hands, they may be lightly whimsical or deadly serious; in either case, they are some of the finest proof of Egerton's capabilities. Far from feeling tacked-on, these details are weaved into the fabric of the fiction, as Egerton plays with his worlds and our minds. One such detail is a description of looking in on the agonized faces in private hospital rooms, "like looking deep into a radiation chamber, knowing that if you open the door--even a crack--all that radiation would zip out and scar your eyes, throat, and skin." With this brief, almost passing note, the whole of the protagonist's relationship with sickness and disease in the antiseptic desert of the hospital is revealed. In "Spelling," the point that America lost Hawaii to Korea in a spelling bee is again mentioned in passing, evoking both chuckles and a sense of terror: in a single line Egerton has given us all we need to know about the politics of this nightmare. Other cases are more light-hearted elements of comedy that show why Egerton has been considered by so many to be an excellent humorist.

If these details describe Egerton's delicate manipulation of narrative, there are just as many examples of immense linchpins: single lines on which the literary value of the story is hinged, which launch the text into the realm of works truly memorable. In such cases, the delicacy is replaced by hammering immediacy, and our hearts and minds are surrendered to the work. In "Tonight at Noon," perhaps the best story in the collection, a jazz enthusiast wakes up to find his girlfriend has committed suicide. He says of jazz virtuoso Charles Mingus, "Most people say The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is his best, and it's good. But Ah Um is going for more. It hurts more. Lives more. Jenny is dead."

These examples may serve to show the incredible sense of balance present in these stories, which may ultimately be what makes them so successful (there is only one exception to this: "The Fecalist" is boring satire--a departure from the usually sophisticated presentation). Comedy and tragedy are bound inextricably; passing jabs, lasting one-liners, and poetic passages are joined by their poetry; whimsy, heartbreak, and joy are merely different sides of the same thing. The stories, in their individual components and as a collection, build off one another with grace and ease.

If a philosophical point is permitted, this playful balance and duality may be the essence of what Egerton calls how best to avoid dying. The characters in these pieces, who are never mere tools of narrative, are all faced, in one form or another, with the agony of dying and the beauty of living. Or is it the other way around? Laughter and sorrow, fear and joy--these may all be the same entity--and assisting that interpretation may be Egerton's primary objective. If this is in fact the case, barring some minor, unmentionable imperfections, he succeeds with dazzling brilliance.

[Author website: www.owenegerton.com]



Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Max Falkowitz, 2007

What can I say about you book?! It. Is. Great. Owen Egerton's short stories are right up my alley - darkly, almost pitch black, hilarious. Gut wrenching. Layered. My favorite entertainment in any genere is simply that which reflects life. And life is funny, sad, scary, loud, calm and everything at different times and sometimes all at once.

We are all headed toward the same fate - read this book and let's connect before then, shall we?

... you are going to die.

How do I know? Owen Egerton told me. He told me he was going to kill you with a loaf of white bread.

Just kidding! Owen Egerton is not going to kill you with bread...

...but you are going to die.

How are you going to die? I don't know precisely. I know your heart will stop beating. You will stop breathing. But the details that caused the cessation is a little harder to nail down. You might die sleeping, or a horrible disease. You might be in a car wreck. Or you might die flying (and subsequent inability to land) a small plane. Maybe you will be at the wrong end of a Chuck Norris fight. You could be devoured by a pit of pigs. Or maybe it will be a freak accident involving a water slide & Christianity. Who knows?

Question: Who knows how you are going to die?
Answer: Owen Egerton
His Answer: A loaf of Wonderbread, with the crusts cut off.

But before you die, make sure you read "How Best to Avoid Dying", the book that somehow made death funny & sweet. I laughed my head off. Which you would think would have killed me... but it didn't. I died the old fashioned way: Owen Egerton beat me with a loaf of bread.