City Pier: Above and Below [Paperback]

Paul G. Tremblay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2007

Above: City is sprawling, technocratic, corrupt, and built hundreds of feet above a bay, resting upon the giant wooden shoulders of Pier. Below: Pier is a seemingly endless maze of stripped sequoia trees with trunks as thick as buildings, branches molded into a complex lattice of support beams and struts. Above and Below: The people. Weapons dealers and hired heavies with major Daddy-issues; a Pier-deported homeless man and a pistol packing priest trying to survive with each other and their terrible secrets; a librarian haunted by City's violent history, his family, and by Balloons; a flawed and shattered woman who wants to escape City no matter the cost. Their lives are a part of each other. Their lives are a part of City Pier.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

CITY PIER: ABOVE AND BELOW is a novella in four short stories from Paul G. Tremblay, author of COMPOSITIONS FOR THE YOUNG AND OLD.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Compositions for the Young and Old:

"Paul Tremblay is a storyteller of the highest order--edgy, sensitive and fearless. As a horror writer, he possesses the deadliest secret: he knows where we live. He is expert at taking us to places where the familiar and comforting give way to the strange and dangerous--those borderlines where anything can and will happen."
--Stewart O'Nan, author of A Prayer for the Dying and The Night Country

"The horrors of Compositions for the Young and Old are entirely of the human variety, however surreal or strange, and run the gamut of pain we are likely to feel in our lives--from the frailty of a child on a wobbly bike to that of an old warrior in a nursing home. Paul Tremblay remembers childhood and anticipates old age and knows all the stages in between. This is accomplished, sensitive work by a writer who not only means to scare you and maybe even warn you, but to move you."
--Jack Ketchum, author of The Girl Next Door and Red

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Prime (March 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809571838
• ISBN-13: 978-0809571833
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,514,121 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Tremblay is the author of The Little Sleep (Henry Holt, March 3, 2009). and No Sleep till Wonderland (February 2010).

He is a three-time nominee of the Bram Stoker award has sold over fifty short stories to markets such as Razor Magazine, Weird Tales, Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three, and Best American Fantasy 3. He is the author of the short speculative fiction collection Compositions for the Young and Old and the forthcoming In the Mean Time (October 2010), and the novellas City Pier: Above and Below and The Harlequin and the Train. He served as fiction editor of CHIZINE and as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and was also the co-editor (with Sean Wallace) of the Fantasy, Bandersnatch, and Phantom anthologies. Paul is currently an advisor for the Shirley Jackson Awards as well.

Paul is very truthful and declarative in his bios. He once gained three inches of height in a single twelve hour period, and he does not have a uvula. His second toe is longer than his big toe, and yes, on both feet. He has a master's degree in mathematics, teaches AP Calculus, and once made twenty-seven three pointers in a row. He enjoys reading The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher aloud in a faux-British accent to his two children. He is also reading this bio aloud, now, with the same accent. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts and he is represented by Stephen Barbara, Foundry Literary + Media.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Surreal and satisfying, May 12, 2007

By 

Jan Wildt (San Diego CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City Pier: Above and Below (Paperback)

Tremblay's 94-page novella is something of a tour de force: four stand-alone stories, in various voices and styles, which interlock in satisfying fashion in a mash-up of science fiction, horror, and noir. All take place in the double milieu of City, a gritty urban environment, and Pier, the stripped coastal sequoia forest whose treetops somehow provide City's foundation. (If this sounds surreal, wait until the balloons arrive.) The hardboiled opener, "Meat's Story", gives us a mad-scientist weapons dealer, his hired muscle, a wayward son, and a dead druglord. "Dole As Ribbit" adds a doubting priest who mind-reads a demented homeless man at the behest of a corrupt cop. "The Strange Case of Nicholas Thomas," detailing the mysterious flotilla of balloons that arrives every 19 years, seems an outright homage to Borges (who also appreciated noir) with its library setting, its layered editorial pseudoscholarship, and its reality-bending implications. Finally, "She Wants To Be Saved" picks up threads from previous stories and knots them in a tangle of blood and degradation, told backward, "Memento"-style. City Pier is preoccupied with fathers and sons and especially with the contrast between gritty adulthood and childhood innocence; like all good noir, it is steeped in melancholy.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Above and Below, May 4, 2008

By 

Jeffrey Thomas (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City Pier: Above and Below (Paperback)

City Pier is a sprawling metropolis filled with, of course, corruption and violence, weirdly built on a pier-like structure the posts of which are fashioned from vast tree trunks, a kind of wooden open-air underworld inhabited by exiles and outsiders. CIY PIER is a slim, curious book, not so much a novella as four short stories that end up linking together, or at least sharing various plot threads in a weird and fascinating PULP FICTION kind of way. Each story seems to get stronger and more assured. The first two, MEAT'S STORY and the achingly sad DOLE AS RIBBIT, feel like they could have made great spots in a SIN CITY graphic novel or movie. But if these two have a gritty kind of Punktown vibe, the next story -- THE STRANGE CASE OF NICHOLAS THOMAS: AN EXCERPT FROM A HISTORY OF THE LONGESIAN LIBRARY -- calls to mind Jeff VanderMeer's CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN, which calls to mind Mark Z. Danielewski's HOUSE OF LEAVES, which may call to mind Nabokov's PALE FIRE, etc. and so on. In other words, an enigmatic plotline seen through shifting veils of stories within stories, and other tricky experiemtal devices. Finally, there is SHE WANTS TO BE SAVED, told backwards ala MEMENTO, the best written of the stories, with some surprises regarding the earlier tales. From this book you can see that Tremblay is willing to experiment in any number of ways in his writerly pursuits, his voice matter-of-fact and jazzy in the first two stories, poetic and haunting in the last two, fusing the fantastical and the literary, working in troubling themes of parenthood in all four stories, and generally leaving us wanting more of City Pier -- or at least, leaving us anxiously awaiting his forthcoming books, such as THE LITTLE SLEEP from Henry Holt & Company and THE HARLEQUIN AND THE TRAIN from Necropolitan Press. (Also impressive is Tremblay's earlier collection, COMPOSITIONS FOR THE YOUNG AND OLD.) Definitely, this is a name to watch.