If there is a party at the end of the universe, Matt Wallace's The Next Fix will be the drug of choice. Two-time Parsec Award-winning author teams with Apex Publications for a new collection of 12 short stories and one novella. With characters as gritty as Sam Spade but as real as your next-door neighbor, The Next Fix cooks up a cocktail of futuristic trips that range from haunting to comedic to don't-turn-out-the-lights. From Wallace's introduction to The Next Fix: You're in my own little chimerical sphere now, but I'm no different than you. I don't shoot, snort, or roll, but I'm my own kind of fiend with my own kind of jones. You can simplify it, call it a fiction addiction. It's much more than that. Part of it's that whole ""art is not a mirror, it's a hammer"" thing. It's powerful. Wallace's quest for the next great high of the imagination takes the reader through the cannibalistic noir of ""The End of Flesh,"" the haunting beauty of endless seekers in ""The Losting Corridor,"" and on an action packed ride-along with offworld postal workers in ""Another Man's Run."" If you like a chaser of tech with your horror, humor with your darkness, and beauty with your grit, The Next Fix is your next high.
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More About the Author
A screenwriter and the award-winning author of over one hundred short stories, Matt spent a decade traveling North America as a professional wrestler and combat instructor before retiring to write fulltime. He now resides in Los Angeles and bleeds exclusively on the blank page.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
There are historic times in your life that you don't know are historical when they happen. It's only years later, when you look back or see some "10 Year Anniversary of X" on TV that you realize, yeah, that was kind of a big deal, and I was there when.
That's the feeling I get when I read THE NEXT FIX. I get that feeling that this book will be some obscure collectible, and that the author will be accepted as one of the best writers of a generation. Not that such a thing guarantees fame and fortune, or even a life that's worth a squirt of pig pee. I mean, look at Jack Kerouac, another "great voice" who winds up croaking from a liver trashed by endless alcohol abuse. But this review isn't about Kerouac, or his liver, or pig urine -- it's about Matt Wallace: young, inventive, hard boiled and talented.
The stories in THE NEXT FIX reveal a natural writing gift that hasn't even begun to fully awaken. In a few sentences, if not a few words, he creates a character that could be the guy on the bar stool next to you, and a situation that has you trying hard to soak up every word, to not skip ahead because you are so damn eager to learn more about the faraway yet "I did this same damn thing just yesterday" place he created. He makes the future real, not with physics, but with a vibe that screams "my back is killing me from a twelve stim-infused hours while jammed into the crappy ergonomics on known as the spaceship's captain's chair, and how the hell am I going to make alimony payments to my wife back on Earth this month?
I'm a writer, and when I read Wallace's short stories, his natural ability seems effortless. And if it's not effortless, if he's not just crapping this stuff out of a Rain Man for Literature brain as easily I pass a bran muffin, then his skill level hints at something that makes me want tap out halfway through the first round, because I just can't take it anymore.
Matt Wallace is flat-out good. If he doesn't keel over from an early heart attack or get shot in the back by a jealous husband (either of which is rather likely), he may be quite well-known before too long. And when that happens, I'll dig out my copy of THE NEXT FIX and think, I was there when ...
That's the feeling I get when I read THE NEXT FIX. I get that feeling that this book will be some obscure collectible, and that the author will be accepted as one of the best writers of a generation. Not that such a thing guarantees fame and fortune, or even a life that's worth a squirt of pig pee. I mean, look at Jack Kerouac, another "great voice" who winds up croaking from a liver trashed by endless alcohol abuse. But this review isn't about Kerouac, or his liver, or pig urine -- it's about Matt Wallace: young, inventive, hard boiled and talented.
The stories in THE NEXT FIX reveal a natural writing gift that hasn't even begun to fully awaken. In a few sentences, if not a few words, he creates a character that could be the guy on the bar stool next to you, and a situation that has you trying hard to soak up every word, to not skip ahead because you are so damn eager to learn more about the faraway yet "I did this same damn thing just yesterday" place he created. He makes the future real, not with physics, but with a vibe that screams "my back is killing me from a twelve stim-infused hours while jammed into the crappy ergonomics on known as the spaceship's captain's chair, and how the hell am I going to make alimony payments to my wife back on Earth this month?
I'm a writer, and when I read Wallace's short stories, his natural ability seems effortless. And if it's not effortless, if he's not just crapping this stuff out of a Rain Man for Literature brain as easily I pass a bran muffin, then his skill level hints at something that makes me want tap out halfway through the first round, because I just can't take it anymore.
Matt Wallace is flat-out good. If he doesn't keel over from an early heart attack or get shot in the back by a jealous husband (either of which is rather likely), he may be quite well-known before too long. And when that happens, I'll dig out my copy of THE NEXT FIX and think, I was there when ...
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Wallace is one of a new breed of authors that have ignored the traditional ways to publish their fictions. What with e-zines, pod casts, blogs, print on demand, and specialty presses, the regular sf and fantasy magazines becoming more and more non-essential for an author's success.
Despite the hyperbole on the back cover of this collection and in these reviews, Wallace is hardly the new second coming of a literary movement. He's good, and with any luck he'll have a long career ahead of him. All of the stories in "The Next Fix" have appeared either in small-press markets or as free pod-casts, or both, and this is his first collection.
Like a lot of first collections, the thirteen story "The Next Fix" is quite of hodge-podge, its stories covering a wide range of subjects and genres. None of the reviews, despite the hyperbole ever get around to telling anybody what's in this collection. So, here's what in "The Next Fix".
--"Absolution, Insured" is the keystone story, and it deals with Earth having been invaded by the lo-gi that will hunt you if you do somebody a wrong, the only way of stopping them is to get the person that has been wronged to give you your absolution, because the lo-gi will stop at nothing to extract justice. Here McBride gets roused out of bed by his friend Carey and is informed that a lo-gi as about to kill Carey. McBride makes the mistake of trying to help Carey; the story's a bit raw, the lo-gi are kinda cool, and we realize that McBride needs to make better friends. Four stars.
--"Delve" is about cloning, and about Stenz who has to monitor and test the crèche born to see if any of the newborns are displaying any socially undesirable traits, and then to eliminate the flawed. That's only about halfway through the story, there's more to come. Three stars.
--"The Losting Corridor" is too cute and too clever for its own good. It tries for hardboiled surrealism and fails, coming across more like a dream fragment and not a complete story. Two stars.
--"No World For Warriors" is about an immortal and emotionally detached warrior who is melancholic and morose by the state of today's soldiers. The story doesn't really go anywhere, and ends up more of a character sketch than a complete story. Two stars.
--"Another Man's Run" is a thoroughly depressing and dark science fiction adventure about a convict who decides to take another con's delivery run. All the deliverymen here are convicts working off their sentences, and most will never live long enough to outlast their sentence. This reads as if Philip K. Dick and Joe R. Lansdale collaborated on a story idea by Fred Pohl and published in H. L. Gold's "Galaxy". Five stars.
--"The Last Frequency" is a fragment of an unwritten novel, and is about an intergalactic war between us and them. Fine. But, this fragment's tone is a little too flip, and too hip for its own good. "The Last Frequency" is just a little too much "sixties", to be any more than just cute. This story was outdated before it was even podcasted. Two stars.
--"Mercury's Magnitude" is a piece of flash fiction set in the same universe as the previous story, with the same characters. Despite being only two pages long, this story has more meat, and more background than "The Last Frequency", and the cuteness factor of "Mercury's Magnitude" is less, perhaps because of its length, so it doesn't wear out its welcome. Three stars.
--"A Place Of Snow Angels" is about Joshua, Earth's savior, his dog, and his sensei. Joshua doesn't want to anyone's savior, and his sensei is a fanatic. Again, there doesn't seem to be a complete story here, we seem to be plopped down in some middle chapter of a longer work, so much more could have been done here. Three stars.
--"Akropolis" is a very dark, very complicated and convoluted condensation of what could have been a novel, and should be read twice. "Akropolis" involves another story about a savior, in this case, the story could almost be read as a Lovecraftian horror-science fiction story. Four stars.
--"My Caroline" is a dark, dark fantasy about how twisted love can be. Very reminiscent of the seventies and eighties underground small-press work of authors like Elizabeth Massie or Deirdre Cox. Not quite sure that I like the very ending, but . . . Four stars.
--"Killing Jars" is a story involving a monster that feeds on people's cruelty, and, somehow, has come to infest the MRI of a hospital that a shop instructor has had to come to after a metal shop accident. Cool monster story, cool horror science fiction story, cool story, cool Ron Goulartian twist ending. Five stars.
--There have been a number of fighting evil/fighting Satan shows on tv lately, and "Old Tricks" is an alternate take on this theme as a hit woman, is sent to kill Satan who is corrupting girls in a Catholic girl's school. You would think that this would be a sleazy, camp romp, but Wallace gives it more of an absurdist slant. "Old Tricks" is a semi-hardboiled romp in the fashion of Ron Goulart's crime/horror fantasy stories. I shouldn't really like stuff like this, and my ex-parish priest would excommunicate me if he found out that I had read it. So don't tell anybody that I'm giving it . . . Four stars.
--"The End Of Flesh" is this collection's full-length novella and unlike "The Losting Corridor" is a hard-boiled science fiction/horror/detective story that works without trying to be too cute, or to be a lame pastiche. Detective Jon Pacson is a man who gets no respect, and who now finds himself investigating a series of cannibal killings. We get cannibal nightclubs, secret sects, and a detective who eventually has to make a hard decision. A good weird detective story, dark and nasty, could have been a full-length novel. Four stars, verging on five.
Great piece of cover art, by Justin Stewart, which is a grimy broken redstone brick wall, which somehow look very appropriate for the collection as a whole.
This collection should get three and a half stars, because Wallace at times seems in desperate need of a good editor, as too many stories here are unfocused or seemingly not complete stories. Still, there's enough really good stuff here to warrant a four star rating and Wallace should only get better.
Despite the hyperbole on the back cover of this collection and in these reviews, Wallace is hardly the new second coming of a literary movement. He's good, and with any luck he'll have a long career ahead of him. All of the stories in "The Next Fix" have appeared either in small-press markets or as free pod-casts, or both, and this is his first collection.
Like a lot of first collections, the thirteen story "The Next Fix" is quite of hodge-podge, its stories covering a wide range of subjects and genres. None of the reviews, despite the hyperbole ever get around to telling anybody what's in this collection. So, here's what in "The Next Fix".
--"Absolution, Insured" is the keystone story, and it deals with Earth having been invaded by the lo-gi that will hunt you if you do somebody a wrong, the only way of stopping them is to get the person that has been wronged to give you your absolution, because the lo-gi will stop at nothing to extract justice. Here McBride gets roused out of bed by his friend Carey and is informed that a lo-gi as about to kill Carey. McBride makes the mistake of trying to help Carey; the story's a bit raw, the lo-gi are kinda cool, and we realize that McBride needs to make better friends. Four stars.
--"Delve" is about cloning, and about Stenz who has to monitor and test the crèche born to see if any of the newborns are displaying any socially undesirable traits, and then to eliminate the flawed. That's only about halfway through the story, there's more to come. Three stars.
--"The Losting Corridor" is too cute and too clever for its own good. It tries for hardboiled surrealism and fails, coming across more like a dream fragment and not a complete story. Two stars.
--"No World For Warriors" is about an immortal and emotionally detached warrior who is melancholic and morose by the state of today's soldiers. The story doesn't really go anywhere, and ends up more of a character sketch than a complete story. Two stars.
--"Another Man's Run" is a thoroughly depressing and dark science fiction adventure about a convict who decides to take another con's delivery run. All the deliverymen here are convicts working off their sentences, and most will never live long enough to outlast their sentence. This reads as if Philip K. Dick and Joe R. Lansdale collaborated on a story idea by Fred Pohl and published in H. L. Gold's "Galaxy". Five stars.
--"The Last Frequency" is a fragment of an unwritten novel, and is about an intergalactic war between us and them. Fine. But, this fragment's tone is a little too flip, and too hip for its own good. "The Last Frequency" is just a little too much "sixties", to be any more than just cute. This story was outdated before it was even podcasted. Two stars.
--"Mercury's Magnitude" is a piece of flash fiction set in the same universe as the previous story, with the same characters. Despite being only two pages long, this story has more meat, and more background than "The Last Frequency", and the cuteness factor of "Mercury's Magnitude" is less, perhaps because of its length, so it doesn't wear out its welcome. Three stars.
--"A Place Of Snow Angels" is about Joshua, Earth's savior, his dog, and his sensei. Joshua doesn't want to anyone's savior, and his sensei is a fanatic. Again, there doesn't seem to be a complete story here, we seem to be plopped down in some middle chapter of a longer work, so much more could have been done here. Three stars.
--"Akropolis" is a very dark, very complicated and convoluted condensation of what could have been a novel, and should be read twice. "Akropolis" involves another story about a savior, in this case, the story could almost be read as a Lovecraftian horror-science fiction story. Four stars.
--"My Caroline" is a dark, dark fantasy about how twisted love can be. Very reminiscent of the seventies and eighties underground small-press work of authors like Elizabeth Massie or Deirdre Cox. Not quite sure that I like the very ending, but . . . Four stars.
--"Killing Jars" is a story involving a monster that feeds on people's cruelty, and, somehow, has come to infest the MRI of a hospital that a shop instructor has had to come to after a metal shop accident. Cool monster story, cool horror science fiction story, cool story, cool Ron Goulartian twist ending. Five stars.
--There have been a number of fighting evil/fighting Satan shows on tv lately, and "Old Tricks" is an alternate take on this theme as a hit woman, is sent to kill Satan who is corrupting girls in a Catholic girl's school. You would think that this would be a sleazy, camp romp, but Wallace gives it more of an absurdist slant. "Old Tricks" is a semi-hardboiled romp in the fashion of Ron Goulart's crime/horror fantasy stories. I shouldn't really like stuff like this, and my ex-parish priest would excommunicate me if he found out that I had read it. So don't tell anybody that I'm giving it . . . Four stars.
--"The End Of Flesh" is this collection's full-length novella and unlike "The Losting Corridor" is a hard-boiled science fiction/horror/detective story that works without trying to be too cute, or to be a lame pastiche. Detective Jon Pacson is a man who gets no respect, and who now finds himself investigating a series of cannibal killings. We get cannibal nightclubs, secret sects, and a detective who eventually has to make a hard decision. A good weird detective story, dark and nasty, could have been a full-length novel. Four stars, verging on five.
Great piece of cover art, by Justin Stewart, which is a grimy broken redstone brick wall, which somehow look very appropriate for the collection as a whole.
This collection should get three and a half stars, because Wallace at times seems in desperate need of a good editor, as too many stories here are unfocused or seemingly not complete stories. Still, there's enough really good stuff here to warrant a four star rating and Wallace should only get better.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Matt Wallace has been providing his work for free for way too many years via podcasts. He along with other emerging writers such as J.C. Hutchins, Scott Sigler, and Mur Lafferty (and this is in no way a complete list of these new writers) are a new generation of creative voices that I feel will soon dominate much of the science fiction/horror genera. Wallace is among the best of the pack. The Next Fix is a must read for SF/Horror fans.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
The Next Fix
I loved this book. M Wallace knows his stuff. Very engaging. Well worth reading if you are into short stories. Horror should be M wallace's middle name.
Published on June 4, 2009 by S. River
Expectations surpassed...buy often
I had high expectations for "The Next Fix" and Matt Wallace has surpassed them all. The book is a must have for all horror junkies. Read more
Published on May 12, 2008 by Robo
Wallace is the new AWESOME!!
Matt Wallace rocks the bells! In this collection of stories and one novella he shows the brilliance that made us all fans of his writing through the Variant Frequencies podcast. Read more
Published on May 11, 2008 by Seth Harwood
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