Customer Reviews

Compositions for the Young and Old

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The only other author with this amount of control over a reader's brain that I can easily identify is Ray Bradbury. Tremblay's horror is in the same blood-curdling, cynically imaginative vein. Tremblay's short fiction is horrific for many reasons, not the least of which is that the reader can easily identify with the most evil, loathsome characters.

For instance, there is the poor, suffering protagonist with back pain. There's a murderous thug who has to swim. There's a demented, perfect magician and a writer having a devil of a time getting things copacetic. There are grandmothers with gifts, siblings getting in trouble and old soldiers dying. Much like Bradbury, Paul G. Tremblay has managed to distill the Human Experience and expose the raw nerve endings of human life. These stories are not scary because of blood and guts, or hideous monsters (although there are a few). They're disturbing and creepy because the characters are all too real, the kind of personalities that you already know, have dinner with, and pass by a thousand times on the way to work.

P.G. also flexes his muscles when it comes to creativity. More than a couple of these stories actively stretch your imagination, make the reader concentrate and present storytelling in a new manner. I was pleasantly surprised by the final short in this anthology, as it was demented enough to grab my attention from beginning to end, but not so chaotic that it lost me.

All in all: Bravo! A perfect collection of unnerving short stores.

Paul Tremblay is an author of deep vision and intense literate style. With this collection, "Compositions For the Young and Old," he has done what most authors don't even attempt; he has tied the entire work together in a cohesive tapestry of images that stand on their own, but would be lessened without the whole. Told in a sequential aging process, from the perspective of very young characters on through the haunting images of an aged colonel in a nursing home, this collection spans years of lives and many levels of pain and poignant emotion.
Some of these stories, particularly in the early pages of the book, are so painful they are difficult to read. A young boy, convinced that the only way he can regain his mother's attention after his father's death is to hurt himself, again and again, and what he does when his mother starts to not pay attention to his baby sister as well as himself. That is a difficult story for a parent to read, and yet, beneath it all there are messages themes that draw you on toward what is to come.
The variety is astonishing, not so much that one mind conceived all these words, but that despite its diversity of theme and setting, this collection fits together like a puzzle constructed of pieces and parts of many other puzzles that happen to fit in this new shape, as well as their old.
As in any collection, there are standout stories. THE POND is one such, how a life can be affected from an early trauma and molded all the way through death. CITY PIER and DOLE AS RIBBIT are two stories that join - two parts of one longer narrative that teases the reader into believing there may be a novel buried there, just out of reach. The two take place in a city that doesn't exist, built over massive piers that overlook an ocean of a hopeless future with an entire civilization living and crawling beneath the planks of the pier. Another amazing tale, one that won the Chiaroscuro Short Story contest and will stick with you for a long time to come is "The Laughing Man Meets Little Cat." This poetic tale uses a perpetually smiling man and his "mission" to lay bear the pain of the world in a little boy's life.
Tremblay shows his diversity by bringing in the ghost of Mark Twain through the eyes of a Ouija board and conjuring Poe from the words of his classic poem Annabel Leigh. Baseball winds its way into "Hackin' at the Peach," where the great Ty Cobb becomes a character.
And the line "Can't Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me" is reversed in "The Harlequin and the Train" in a manner that is sure to cause both deep thought and the loss of perfectly digested food.
This is a very strong collection from a talented author. Readers of Cemetery Dance will notice that the prose is very reminiscent of Gary Braunbeck. One of the finest collections I've read in years.

Paul Tremblay is a true craftsman, and his literate stories will create emotions in readers similar to those of such luminaries as Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison. There is an insightful intelligence at work here, and a love of language, but these stories are easily digested. The 20 tales are assembled in the chronological order of a man's lifetime, but they are only connected thematically; each gem exists unto itself. "The Harlequin and the Train," "With More Than Eyes," "4'33" and "The Laughing Man Meets Little Cat" are just some of the treasures you'll discover, and they will stand the test of time. Like Bradbury and Ellison, Tremblay is more interested in exploring the human condition than in limiting himself to any one genre, and anyone who reads this book will likely be as impressed by the breadth of material as they will be by the quality of the stories themselves. Get on this train now.

"Compositions for the Young and Old" is an excellent collection showcasing the talents of up-and-coming spec-fic writer Paul Tremblay. Stories like "4'33", "The Laughing Man Meets Little Cat" and "So Many Things Left Out" will knock your socks off. Tremblay knows how to wring emotions out of the reader while dazzling them with his writing skills. He's one of my new favorite authors.

This is an excellent collection of short stories. In the traditoin of Stephen King, some are of the horror genre and some are just damn fine stories. Terrific storytelling and well written, this should be recommended to anyone who enjoys a good read!

In the introduction to Paul Tremblay's debut collection, Jeffrey Thomas describes the reasoning behind the specific order of the stories: "The earliest stories herein take the viewpoint of children, the last told from the perspective of people in their waning days, and between lie the years that form the twisty path between cradle and grave." Purple prose, to be sure, but he gets the point across: Tremblay has ordered his Compositions for the Young and Old according to "the chronological arc of a human life."

That would be fascinating enough in itself as a concept, but Tremblay follows through with a cache of tales that provoke both thought and emotion, and show his comfort with portraying all seven ages of man. (The title references a track off of Bob Mould's debut solo album, Workbook.)

Some of the stories are better than others, of course, but one must admire his ability to get into the minds of characters and present their stories believably. The best Compositions for the Young and Old are those where Tremblay uses his specialty: a self-conscious style of speaking to the reader that is familiar and comforting. It allows the reader a glimpse of the author's personality that makes it easy for him to lead us into the unexpected -- into a tale like "Walls" with its organic surrealism combined with social commentary -- and make us go willingly and unquestioningly.

Tremblay also showcases his skill at rethinking cultural icons, such as Ty Cobb (if you don't cringe during "Hackin' at the Peach," check your vital signs) and Mark Twain ("So Many Things Left Out" gives new meaning to the phrase "dead narrative"). Focusing on John Cage's infamous composition, the definition of art takes a tumble in "4'33," showing the sometimes brutal effect one artist's work can have on another's. "Annabel Leigh" is less than totally successful, but only because its ambition is so high. Otherwise, it's a fine "haunted house" gothic that references Poe without copying his style.

"The Harlequin and the Train" all but jumped out at me. Its combination of the mundanity of life onboard an MBTA commuter train with absolute out-of-left-field weirdness makes for a fascinating read. The phrase "insanity is when everything makes sense" summarizes the feeling I had while reading, of all places, onboard an MBTA commuter train. "The Jar" harkens back to the classics of the horror genre, tainted-object tales like "The Monkey's Paw", but with the tone and subtlety of a Twilight Zone episode. My favorite, though, is "Perception." It begins as one kind of story, told in a satiric tone, and then slowly becomes another through a twist that plays with the reader's own perceptions. This is metafiction at its finest.

My only real complaint is with the efficacy of the story order. Compositions for the Young and Old is a terrific title and an original concept but I would have ordered the stories by theme instead of life stage. This is mainly because the last story, "Colonel Evans' Last Mission," is a real downer (in addition to being too long) and that would not be the mood I would want my readers to carry away with them. Rather to end on a more upbeat note with "The Jar" and fit the good Colonel next to a moodier story like "Reaching."

Careful reading reveals that Tremblay has a literary style above and beyond the usual spoon-feeder prose. He could be published in The New Yorker if he were writing about adulterous suburbanites instead of exploding clowns and unanesthetized tonsil removal. Even his prose poems speak to a part of my brain normally shut off to that method of expression, allowing concepts such as a staircase-as-guilt metaphor to seep through unimpeded. I don't know if Tremblay's high-minded mathematics education has anything to do with this but, based on the contents of Compositions for the Young and Old, I'm very curious to see what he could do with a novel.