Customer Reviews

Other Resort Cities

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It's as if Tod Goldberg, author of "Other Resort Cities" (I think he must have got the name from an offramp sign on Interstate 10 near Palm Springs) needed to get out for a run and flex his writing muscles - and flex he does: this collection of short stories exposes a 9-octave writing range. At one extreme, we hear from two little girls (written in second person!) who were abandoned as kids by a good father who is run off by a narcissistic mother. At the other extreme, we find ourselves inside the head of a mentally ill man who has turned his home (in a pricey gated community) into a Starbucks just for himself! Goldberg can write about the colors and moods of the desert like few others, from the existentialist desolation of the Salton Sea to the hubristic excesses of the country club set. If you liked Wells Tower in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, you'll definitely enjoy Other Resort Cities.

Tod Goldgerg is goddamn insane. He's a maniac. A sicko from whacko-dom. But I'm not reviewing Tod Goldberg, the man, I'm reviewing his book of short stories, "Other Resort Cities."

Tod Goldberg's short stories are goddamn insane. They're maniacal. The mind that thought them up is a sick whacko - but I mean that in a good way. Because sick whacko works. His stories scream, "you're a sick whacko too, that's why you're enjoying the hell outta this!" And it's true. I'm not ashamed to say it - my sick whacko mind is all up in simpatico with Goldberg's. His characters, although a bit too closely resembling members of my non-immediate family, are way out there weird. They either do nasty stuff, or have nasty stuff done to them, and the result is we have to witness their down fall, when in reality they should be put on the short bus to long term therapy sessions. To say Goldberg mines the depravity of real life for his surreal and often times uncomfortable subject matter is only too obvious. But is his Rabi really a mobbed up hit man on the lam?

Mondo Nior never tasted this good before - thank you Mr. Goldberg.

Mr. Goldberg's latest short story collection gives us a gritty insider's look at characters who are stuck, who want out, characters looking in, stuck out in the cold, characters who have stories and pasts and problems and yet often become more than the sum of those problems in an instant. These are children, all grown up, trying to recall the present day's and put away their ugly pasts. These are people you know, people who normally hide the realities of their confusion and pain behind a big fake smile. They have willingly, with Goldberg's precise pen strokes, laid open their slivered up souls for your close inspection.

We meet a Las Vegas cocktail waitress who adopts a child from Russia only to lose everything she hoped to gain. We want to hug her, touch her, step in and warn her. We meet a man deserted by his wife who turns his gated community home into a Starbucks perhaps in his momentum he's simply searching for something that will not change, somewhere to belong, something called normalcy. We are given all the gore and yet we're left to come to our own conclusions. This is what the best short stories do. They talk to you, they entice you, dating your intellect and then they walk away leaving you wanting more.

The premise's of these stories, the settings, the characters, are all quirky and fraught with difficult situations, and yet they are so real the pages lay out before you like the hot mean streets of the resort vacation landscapes within. People shuffling through their often mundane lives, facing insane situations and yet these characters are real and come home to live within your brain long after you've turned the page, packed your suitcase and arrived back home. Click goes your suitcase; out they come creeping again like dirty laundry, not soon to leave you alone.

These are characters that act in the heat of passion and react to the outcome with an intensity that results in a fantastic read. As always, Goldberg delivers the goods to the hardcore reader looking for the dangerous, the exciting, and the best literary crack.