Excuse Me While I Cut the Cheese

You didn’t catch the two “cuts” in the title. You’re slacking, man.

I hear a Bizarro World Hendrix singing that title … and cannot unhear it.

I wonder if farts of someone on LSD have hallucinogenic properties. Looks like somebody inhaled.

Ok, I read it, and I’m still alive to tell the tale. Here’s my official Goodreads take:

I’m torn on whether this book deserves 2 or 3 stars… ultimately I’m giving it 3 for potential’s sake, because I think that the author must be fairly new at his craft but I think if he keeps writing, someday he’ll be pretty good.

So, I found this book on https://lousybookcovers.com – and the cover is, in fact, lousy, in a spectacular, maybe intentional, Miley Cyrus’s forray into sculptural art, what the fuck is happening here kind of way. I was intrigued, and because it only cost 99 cents, I took the plunge (as Macklemore would say in that foul year of our lord 2013, shiiit).

Appropriately, I had pretty low expectations going into this – it’s a collection of 5 flash fiction stories comprising a grand total of 17 pages, and I wasn’t entirely sure it would be written in a literate version of English. Surprisingly it was, putting it heads and shoulders above 85 percent of the drivel self-published on Amazon, and from there things got predictably weird.

There are talking, severed toes, anuses with razor teeth, Cajun recipes for human flesh, and and… well, I think I picked up on a theme, at least. I won’t spoil it – it’s only 17 pages. Most of the stories are imaginative and creepy and surreal in a fun way, and all of them could be developed into longer pieces that continue the macabre tone Ridge is striving for.

I was pleasantly surprised at how not-awful this was, and while I can’t say that it’s good, I do wish that the author had some sort of web presence I could follow him on because I think given a few more years of practice he’ll be writing really decent stuff.