On "All Our Canoes Are Safely Ashore" by B. J. Hollars (1519 words) ****

Another grand story from B. J. Hollars, this one is full of surprises. The piece works with short paragraphs and minimal presentation. At first, I found that form rather irritating. But the minimism works here because a few paragraphs down something's going to happen that can't be easily explained with a denser tongue. We get externals. Characters struggle to do right in the face of a situation they didn't foresee. And then . . . Hollars does it again, as he brings us to the end, tying these characters together not once but twice, in ways dissimilar and yet, if you believe George Battaile's ideas on sex and death, not dissimilar at all. Read the story here at Corium Magazine.

On "The Regatta" by B. J. Hollars (635 words) ***

When I first came across B. J. Hollars's work, I found it rather fantastical--well, most of the time. Occasionally, he ventured into straight-out realism. But the works I enjoyed most were those that had strange connections to this world.

Most recently, Hollars's work has seemed to move toward the gothic--or at least what I think of as gothic. We have stories of people doing disturbing things told in hyped-up and beautiful prose. This short recent piece is emblematic of that. Ostensibly the story of a boy in some kind of race out on the water, it's power is drawn from the odd use of language--paddles like crossbones--and by a rather chilling metaphor made real toward its end. Read the story here at Dogzplot.

On "The Friends" by B. J. Hollars (1882 words) ****

Here's a heartbreaker. Same old story--one person in love, the other not. Neither of them apparently really talk about it. This one goes on, and on, and on--for years. What makes this one special, I think, is the degree of closeness that the two characters have, in part caused by an unfortunate event near the story's beginning. From there, the dates of the events make the rest of this tale grow sadder and sadder. Read the story here at Necessary Fiction.

On "Suspension" by B. J. Hollars (3921 words) ***

Hollars can tell some whoppers, but sometimes he tells quiet stories also. This is the second story I've read of his that features a father-son relationship at its center. This one is particularly charming in that the difficulties, the problems, are so subtle. We watch parents having marriage problems through the eyes of an admiring kid. We don't see lots of battles, lots of big fights. What we see instead are two parents who still, in some way, love each other but whose priorities are different. And we see a kid get along with them both, love them both, remember them both fondly. We also learn a lot of about monster trucks (rallies for which I've never actually been to). Read the story here at Memorious. Then go buy some monster truck tickets for your loved ones.

On "The Basketball Captain's Wife" by B. J. Hollars (1261 words) ****

This is a tough story, a disturbing story (and a very tight one as well, coming in at just over 1000 words but with back story only hinted at that demands rereading). I remember writing at some point about a story involving a man with Asperger's syndrome published at Summerset Review, and I wonder here if the narrator of this story suffers from the same complex but without being aware of it. Or maybe not. Because it's also a strange story in which the cruel behavior of the narrator becomes not just something tied in to an inability to catch others' emotions but rather an ability to catch others' emotions precisely and exploit them for cruel ends. Or maybe not even cruel ends--just self-justifying ends. Maybe even ends to help assuage grief in some twisted sense. In the end, that is part of what makes this story mysterious. Anyway, the one thing I do know, after reading the story, is Wheeler is a place I'd rather not visit. Find out why by reading the story here at Diagram. (Warning: This story involves adult language and situations.)

On "An Odd-Looking Catfish" by B. J. Hollars (2083 words) ***

Another odd and fantastic (in more ways than one) story by B. J. Hollars. This one involves a man who finds his daughter after ten years, finds her while fishing one day, inside a boot. Like the best stories of fantastic realism, the weird tale is told as if totally plausible and the weird situation itself becomes a kind of analogy for a lot of what's going on in the story--the loss that the father feels and the inability to understand someone who has changed, who is no longer that person, that friend or kid, you used to know (a loss of a different sort but loss nonetheless). Read the story here at the Summerset Review.

On "Extinction" by B. J. Hollars (2385 words) ***

If the Hollars story featured earlier on this blog (here) was fantastic realism, this one falls more precisely into the realism camp. That earlier story, with its odd subject matter, caught my attention much more quickly, but this story still managed to keep me reading.

"Extinction" is, in part, a story about stereotypes. They aren't the stereotypes we usually think of, when looking at a national or human level--racial, gender, or otherwise. These stereotypes are more personal than that. These are stereotypes that two characters have built up about each other--a dad who fails to acknowledge that his son has grown up, and a son who can't see his father for the new man he is. This is also a story about change, two men dealing with grief, one the loss of a mother, the other the loss of a wife. And most important, this a story about desperation, about a dad trying to hang on--to life, to people, to anyone really, but most especially to his son. Stirring doesn't publish fiction very often, it seems, so the stories are rather special when they do. Read the piece here at Stirring.

On "Lifelines" by B. J. Hollars (1521 words) ****

I love fantastic realism, but so much of the genre that I come across on the Net tries too hard, compromises with the very heart of what fantastic realism does, which is merge the two elements in such a way that the fantastic seems very real. At it's best, though, the genre makes for great reading and interesting commentary on one of humanity's conditions (generally one to two of them at a time--social, ethical, existential, whatever). This story, which appears in Fawlt Magazine--itself an interesting endeavor, themed around various human faults with each issue (and somehow managing still to have enough to select from to be good)--this story is about man who grows up with a broken heart, which somehow requires that he wears mittens full time. I couldn't help but identify with him in his early life, the way everyone wants to protect him, which in turn isolates him, as my rather frail frame as a kid tended to do to me (kids wouldn't let me play football with them, lest I get hurt). I also thought of other cases, a kid I knew who actually had had a heart operation, and who couldn't do any sort of aerobic activity and who was, thus, likely even more isolated than I ever was. Hollars's does such a great job of painting this picture that I was thinking from a point of view I hadn't really considered before, and then the story grows as the character does, leading to its tragic end. Expect to read more about Hollars's stories on this blog; I've been coming across him quite a bit lately and have generally been pleased. Read the story here.