The
Odd and the Strange:
A
Collection of Very Short Fiction
by
Harvey Havel
Genre:
Horror, Sci-Fi, Surrealist, Fabulist
A
Collection of Very Short Fiction from a variety of genres, including
but not limited to horror, science fiction, politics, and the
surreal. These celebrated very short stories have been collected over
a number of years and have been published in a variety of online
e-zines and posted on various websites.
THE
ODD AND THE STRANGE by Harvey Havel is a collection of urban tales
that toe the line of reality.
The
subtitle of Harvey Havel’s THE ODD AND THE STRANGE is A
Collection of Very Short Fiction.
A better one would be A
Very Long Book of Normal-Sized Short Fiction.
There are 89 stories in all, most 5-10 pages long (though a few
stretch to nearly twenty), with unassuming titles like “Visitation,”
“Girlfriend,” and “Daughter.” Though set in the real world,
the stories tease reality with nameless characters–the candidate,
the doctor, the Big Man–and fantastical occurrences, similar to the
parables of Jorge Luis Borges (Argentine short-story writer,
essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language
literature).
Being
a librarian, I was eager to read the story “The Librarian.” A
young male librarian–unnamed, naturally–looks into a mirror in
his office and sees not his reflection but a woman with “walnut
hair luxuriously long and her skin as supple as a young girl’s.”
He has seen her many times, and though the two cannot touch, they can
talk. What do they talk about? The books he steals from the library
and passes into the mirror for her to read. Eventually, his boss
confronts the librarian over the missing books only to be told that
the latter he gave them to his mirror-world girlfriend. To prove this
claim, the librarian tries to summon the woman, and when she doesn’t
appear, the librarian smashes the mirror. You can imagine the rest.
Some
stories are less Borges and more Stephen Crane (author of The
Red Badge of Courage):
bleak, violent. Like “Lightning Love,” narrated by a wife whose
husband changes into . . . something (the twist at the end is
brilliant). Others are political fables, like “Santa Claus and
Madam Secretary,” which makes Havel’s proclivities as clear as
the image on a 98-inch TV. His style can be clunky–one woman’s
breasts are described as “shaped like a queen’s”–and some
endings are telegraphed. A few stories, like “Sex Toy,” are more
like story fragments. Yet THE ODD AND THE STRANGE is quite an
accomplishment: unusual, provocative, and honest.
Mixing
the fabulism of Jorge Luis Borges with the bleakness of Stephen
Crane, the tales contained in Harvey Havel’s THE ODD AND THE
STRANGE draw the reader into a world they won’t soon forget.
~Anthony
Aycock for IndieReader
**Get
this book at 50% off at Smashwords
and check out Harvey's other books
– a lot of them are FREE or on
sale at Smashwords
too!**
Harvey
Havel is a short-story writer and novelist.
His
first novel, Noble McCloud, A Novel, was published in November of
1999. His second novel, The Imam, A Novel, was published in
2000.
Over
the years of being a professional writer, Havel published his third
novel, Freedom of Association. He worked on several other books and
published his eighth novel, Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt, and
his ninth, The Orphan of Mecca, Book One, which was released several
years ago. A full trilogy of this work had been completed a few years
after Mr. Big is about a Black-American football player who deals
with injury and institutionalized racism. This book was published in
2017. It's his fifteenth book.
The
Wild Gypsy of Arbor Hill is his sixteenth book, and his seventeenth
is a non-fiction political essay about America's current political
crisis, written in 2019. He has just now published his eighteenth
book, The Odd and The Strange: A Collection of Very Short
Fiction.
Havel
is formerly a writing instructor at Bergen Community College in
Paramus, New Jersey. He also taught writing and literature at the
College of St. Rose in Albany as well as SUNY Albany.
$15
Amazon giftcard,
ebook of choice from author
– 1 winner each!
No comments:
Post a Comment