Customer Reviews

Pocket Full of Loose Razorblades

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Bizarro author John Edward Lawson's first short fiction collection is a messy affair. Messy in the pulsing, spurting, purple toxic sludge pit kind of way. Messy like those moments when Cronenberg decides to show you wet things writhing. For those jumping into this collection, invest in some wet-naps; you're going to feel dirty by the end of the affair.

Lawson's tales here, many of which are experimental in a way that defies standard storytelling, are uniformly strange. For example, the best story of the batch, "Consumable Leftovers," involves a man who leaves behind his cubicle life for the wilderness. What starts as an entertaining attack on modern culture takes a grotesque (or is it just gross?) turn when the narrator finds himself encamped in the warm and fruitful bowels of a giant. I'm not kidding. But Lawson manages to take what could have been a juvenile exercise in ass humor and turns it into a funny and entertaining metaphorical rumination.

Other stories of note are "Fabricating Opiates" in which three characters roam a labyrinthine house and are forced by old men to remove garments for reasons unknown, and "A Blight in the Darkness" about Urban Decay Specialists working in a corroding future to make sure the world continues to fall to bits. And the author has an obsession with ice cream trucks that can only be described as "unhealthy."

Not every strange bird in this collection takes flight (as in sections 2-4 of "Less Than Lickable," a lengthy piece about the obsessions of a mentally ill man) but when Lawson's firing on all synapses he's got a gift for the surreal that makes you follow him into the weirdest, wettest places with a smile on your face. And for those looking for an escape from werewolves, serial killers, and vampires, Pocket Full of Loose Razorblades offers a nice vacation- as long as you don't mind venturing into a gigantic bowel now and then.

This collection is an excellent introduction to the work of John Lawson. His stories conjure up worlds that are like cover songs of our reality, where the original version is recognizable, but its absurdism, grotesqueness, humor, and refusal to adhere to the laws of physics make it into something entirely different. There was this feeling that I kept getting as I read this book, something difficult to communicate without sounding a little silly: something alien-like and gooey, like I was spending time in a radically different headspace.

My favorite story in the book was 'Less Than Lickable,' which is novella-length. This one is a little different from the rest. Instead of using a world of the bizarre, Lawson chooses to use a more familiar setting while sucking up all the strangeness of his other stories into the body of the mentally unbalanced protagonist, who manipulates his environment in many amusing ways.