Small Apartments (Paperback)

~ Chris Millis (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Hilarious and engaging...an impressive achievement for a first novel." -- The Post-Star (Glen Falls, NY)

"The novel...is a quick and engaging two-hour read with pithy dialogue delivered at a thriller's page-turning pace." -- The Saratogian (Saratoga Springs, NY

"brisk and compact...surprisingly expansive thematic breadth, a thoughtful, silly yet serious life study in goofy pathos." -- The Globe and Mail, September 8, 2001

Product Description

WINNER OF THE ANVIL PRESS 23TH ANNUAL 3-DAY NOVEL-WRITING CONTEST. Small Apartments, a capricious comedy of errors resonates with tremulous energy and memorable characters. Franklin Franklin is a fully realized and sympathetic protagonist in the vein of Ignatius Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces), a simple man who yearns for "a land of pastoral serenity" devoid of the irritants of contemporary urban life. An off-beat tale, Small Apartments is accented along the way by murder, strange fingernail collections, and the occasional blast from a treasured alphorn.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Anvil Press; 1 edition (August 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1895636353
• ISBN-13: 978-1895636352
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,516,223 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quirky Goodness, February 18, 2008

By	T. F. Torrey (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Franklin plays the alphorn and dreams of Switzerland. His crazy brother sends him fingernail clippings in the mail. One of his neighbors is a forgetful pot-head, the other a gruff busybody who doesn't miss anything. Across the street live a mother and her fifteen-year-old daughter, whom he likes to watch from his window, but none of these are Franklin's real problem. His real problem is that his landlord is dead, laid out on the linoleum of his kitchen, and Switzerland seems farther away all the time.

Small Apartments, by Chris Millis, captures the reader with the dead landlord on the kitchen floor and Franklin in his underwear, and it only gets stranger from there. As we learn more about Franklin's life and how he has come to have a dead landlord in his kitchen, we are compelled to keep reading, wondering how in the world everything might work out fine. Millis projects a wistful sadness throughout the book, and even the funny parts seem like laughing through the pain. Far from making the reader want to put the book aside, however, the gloomy mood creates a sympathy for Franklin, and a hope that the book will end happy for him, in some degree, anyway. The direness of his situation generates real interest in how the author will bring this about, and the pages keep turning.

From a writer's perspective, Small Apartments could serve as a textbook for writing a novel in three days. Looking at it from a high level, it seems evident that Millis sketched the characters and developed the arc of scenes and chapters before starting the competition, then used his writing time to race through the text, allowing quirky tangents to come up when the muse moved him. The process resulted in a solid work that feels larger than it is, with interesting characters on a strange and unforgettable ride. It's the kind of book that makes a writer think a-ha, so that's how it's done.

Small Apartments won the 23rd International 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest, and deservedly so. It has unusual and interesting characters, a solid plot, clever twists, and a quirky goodness all the way through. I have yet to see a 3-Day Novel Contest winner that I did not like, and this is no exception. Don't miss it.