My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories [Hardcover]

Steve Almond (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2002

Steve Almond's collection My Life in Heavy Metal features twelve powerful stories that take a clear-eyed view of relationships between young men and women who have come of age in an era without innocence. In the title story, an El Paso newspaper clerk assigned to review the heavy metal bands that play the local arenas is drawn in by the primal music, which fuels a torrid affair with a Chicana woman that will change him forever. In "Geek Player, Love Slayer," a thirty-three-year-old woman harbors a secret, desperate crush on the young computer repairman in her office -- until her ardor is unleashed at an after-work party, with unexpected consequences. In "Valentino," two teenagers spending their last summer together before heading off to college experience a sexual awakening inspired by the legend of a long-dead movie star. By turns tender and raw, visceral and otherworldly, the stories of My Life in Heavy Metal capture the moments when the fires of passion burn over and subside into embers of pain and longing. It is a dazzling debut by an exciting and vibrant new voice in American fiction. "A brilliant, sexy debut." -- Stewart O'Nan "I read these wonderful stories with awe, envy, and delight. Almond is a writer to watch." -- Rick DeMarinis "These stories are tender, funny, and magnetic.... Here's an exciting voice that's bound to make some noise." -- Ernesto Quinonez

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his smart and self-assured debut, My Life in Heavy Metal, Steve Almond breathes fresh life into the oft-explored territory of young love and longing. The 12 stories in this pulsating collection are populated with hookups, drunken kisses, failed passes, and souring relationships. And though it's an aggressively sexual affair (when it comes to getting it on in the bedroom--or on the bathroom sink, for that matter--Almond doesn't believe in fading to black), at its core it's a collection with heart. His characters stumble unrehearsed through the choreography of modern love, wearing their sloppy passions on their rumpled sleeves, aching to connect.

The memorable title story introduces David, an El Paso music critic on the "late-eighties hair bands" circuit who cheats on his longtime college girlfriend with an unassuming YMCA lifeguard. "Because we were a morning paper, I had to bang out my copy by midnight. I operated on a template involving an initial bad pun, a lengthy playlist--adjective, adjective, song title--and a description of the lead singer's hair." Almond hilariously captures the flirty, stylized banter and drinks-after-work breeziness of office life in "Geek Player, Love Slayer." He spins this bittersweet story from a female, first-person perspective as a thirtysomething reporter at an alternative weekly finds an unlikely obsession in the oddly alluring Lance, the paper's overconfident systems administrator ("How did Computer Guy become the Lifeguard of the decade?"). In another standout story, "How to Love a Republican," a doomed cross-party affair plays out against the 2000 presidential election.

Readers should take note of this solid debut and stay on the lookout for more from Almond--he's a sharp and surprisingly sensitive writer with plenty of stories to tell. --Brad Thomas Parsons

From Publishers Weekly

This collection of 12 short stories is populated by some interesting characters in problematic situations and some not-so-interesting ones in situations familiar enough to be trite. The title story is an example of the latter, with its lackluster pop music critic caught in bed with a new conquest by his college lover. More successful is "Among the Ik," in which aging Professor Rodgers, uneasy with his adult children, recalls a bizarre experience from his early life in academia. Telling about it tests his coming to terms with widowhood; even a second reading of this poignant story is rewarding. "Geek Player, Love Slayer" is an update on the old-fashioned office romance and features a female reporter with a raunchy vocabulary that belies her 33 years. She engages in "lurid banter with Computer Boy" Lance, who can talk to machines. "How to Love a Republican" is thoroughly entertaining, with a James Carvill wannabe meeting his young Mary Matalin when they are in New Hampshire doing "issue work." The aftermath of the election dooms the romance, but the story is a humorous success. The narrator of "The Body in Extremis" is a 34-year-old composition teacher (Almond teaches creative writing at Boston College and Emerson College), who has an "essential problem": "Sexual ideation dominated my thoughts," he declares. This final story casts a narcissistic shadow over the preceding fiction, but there's enough intelligence, angst and humor woven through the collection to please the young audience at which it is aimed. Agent, Amy Williams of ICM. (Apr.)Forecast: This collection has a high entertainment quotient, as signaled by the title, previous publication of some of the stories in Playboy and Zoetrope, and Almond's smooth-flowing prose. Expect a few extra browser hits.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st edition (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802116302
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116307
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,034,003 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended book, but just ok, January 13, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories (Hardcover)

The words used by reviewers and readers were stunning, dynamic, monumental, remarkable debut......I found the book to be good, but NOT as great as other short story authors debuts. I was expecting something much better, especially after reviews from when he was here last spring. For a book that was supposed to be very erotic, I found the sex in it very selfish. I also found the men, shallow, gasping for love, gasping for intimacy, but very underdeveloped. Psychologically I wanted to know why each character lost the girl in the end. This is probabally the issue of the author, but I'd rather dive into the characters than the problems the author has with relationships.

The strength of this book is the dialog and poetic prose, which were very very strong----actually delightful. The author should beef up his characters just a bit to give them real individualism, and then this book would be stunning, etc.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "My Life in Heavy Metal", March 29, 2002

By 

"davidmclblair" (Medford, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories (Hardcover)

My Life in Heavy Metal is a wonderful first book of short stories, so funny in places that it is easy to miss what is serious, disturbing and funny about it. It is a tremendously bawdy book, and its humor--for instance when the narrator of "How to Love a Republican" speculates on why Republican men shun cunnilingus--is wild and bawdy. But the humor in these pieces is more often than not a sad humor, its narrators essentially unforgiving of themselves. More often than not, Almond seems to suggest, sex is the hard place where the ego splinters and fragments and after which the ego rejoins, battered but tragically reinforced.

The stories vary in tone. "Geek Player, Love Slayer" is one of two or three stories that essentially borrow their structure from romantic comedies. In deed, one could imagine some smart producer optioning them. The short shorts in this collection--"Moscow" and "The Law of Honey"--are lyrical celebrations of the force of desire and the goodness of desire. These are brief lyrics that celebrate the pursuit and not consummation as part of our noblest aspirations. Almond is attracted to an earthy dream of eastern Europe that we might get from the poems of Simic or Milosz as a sort of pure imaginative territory of smoked meat, pickled fish, and cabbage, a smoke-filled alternative to the disembodied health of snowboarders and their ilk. "The Last Single Days of Don Victor Potapenko" has some of the mouthy chutzpah of Babel's Jewish gangster stories like "How It Was Done In Kiev."

Almond's natural story telling terrain is the culture of young, intensely ambitious and narcissistic educated professionals. Ambition, narcissism: how much of America does that cover? One wonders if Almond, a former journalist, chose to move to Boston to examine the specimens that he needed to tell his stories. There is a certain amount of sociological comedy in his tales of life on the edges of college campuses. His story "The Pass" simultaneously tells the story of people making passes at each other: two gay soldiers at a night club in German, two middle aged business people in an airport, a couple having a possibly romantic dinner in an apartment, and best of all, some sort of software schnook at an apartment party in what sounds like Cambridge. There is some fantasia, some of his Eastern European wit in his well imagined German nightclub. But his bread and butter egotists are sitting down to sup and drank somewhere between Harvard and Tufts.

Some of the stories in the collection are linked narratives, a sort of Rake's Progress, about a character named David, an aspiring writer with a disastrous love life. The first of these is "My Life in Heavy Metal" is set in Texas where David whom we meet as a young journalist carrying on an affair with a lifeguard while living with his ideal girlfriend from college. This is a story about the disastrous effects of infidelity, a story of sexual shame. A third story deals with the same character a few years later, conducting an affair with a Polish woman and then, no longer content with a long distance relationship, attempting to live with her and her mother in a small industrial town in Poland, a living situation that ends in disaster and shame. The third story "Bodies in Extremis" finds this character trying to jumpstart a teaching career and having a casual relationship with a younger woman-- a deeply unappealing and ambitious conformist--that becomes, as the two characters rehearse their own narcissism, disturbing--disturbing for its intensity and failure to result in love. Later on, the young woman seems to punish David with a disturbing gesture--arranging for him to walk into a room where she has just had sex with somebody else-- only David can not be sure what she has intended. Sex in each of these stories becomes increasingly disturbing, more--from a certain point of view, if you are the kind of person who keeps score--accomplished, but less rewarding, more draining and damaging. "Bodies in Extremis" is in some ways suggestive of Frank Bidart's grand poems about erotic life in their sense of trouble and heartache. However, Almond's sense of the erotic life being linked to the ambitions of the ego marks him as his own sort of moralist. It is this dark sensibility that unifies even the happier and romantically plotted stories in Almond's collection.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Take it slow, May 23, 2002

By 

Ellen Meister (NY, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories (Hardcover)

The publisher should advise the reader to take these stories one at a time. Blow through it, and you'll miss the micro details, the nuances of language, the zoom lens observations that remind you of why you love reading in the first place.
Yes, there's sex here. And if that turns you off, by all means take a pass. But if you love the idea of small moments made large with words utterly original, yet never contrived or self-conscious, check it out. My Life in Heavy Metal is rich with jewels