For years, Jen Conley, one of the editors at the red-blooded crime magazine, Shotgun Honey, has been writing short stories for publications such as Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Thuglit, Beat to a Pulp, All Due Respect, and Trouble in the Heartland: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Bruce Springsteen.
Now she has brought forth a collection of 15 of those wonderful stories: Cannibals: Stories from the Edge of the Pine Barrens.
Not all of Conley’s stories are crime tales, mind you. “Cannibals,” the story the collection takes its name from, is more of a horror yarn. It is disturbing and not to be read on a dark, storm-riven night, but no crime is actually committed in it. It turns on psychology, not the supernatural, and is as intense as salt in a gash.
The same is true of “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City,” “Kick” or “Debbie, the Hero.” All are really slice of life stories – tales of people who are up against it, who have run out of options. People stuck in dead-end lives, facing a future as bleak as a winter squall blowing up out of the Atlantic.
Make no mistake, however: all of them are as intense as anything by Goodis, Cain or Jim Thompson/ Some have the anarchy and blank nihilism of Hubert Selby Jr. – they are bleak and aimless. Several reminded me of Selby’s masterpiece, Last Exit to Brooklyn.
If there is a weakness to this volume, it lies in the stories called “Howling,” “Circling,” and “Angels.” Each involves a police officer, Andrea Vogel, and an incident that occurs when she is working her beat in the communities just outside the Pine Barrens. One is a rape, one is an investigation of a reported noise in the piney woodland. A third is the tale of Vogel’s protection of a man with extreme gambling debts – a man she once dated before she married.
These are all terrific stories; The problem is, when I finished Cannibals, I wanted more Vogel. I fell in love with this character.
Cannibals is a sensational piece of work. Jen Conley can proudly take her place with such amazing writers as Patti Abbott, Vicki Hendricks and Bonny Jo Campbell, her sisters in the field of dark crime.
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