Reviews of A Bed of Nails
MID-WINTER 2004 forewordmagazine.com
With cover art representing twisted, piercing fish hooks, this collection of thirteen short stories seems to promise sharp menace and pain. What arises through the movement of the collection, however, is a striking portrait of survival in the face of an overwhelming world. The characters who people these stories are always just barely in control, yet somehow they manage to remain afloat in the flotsam of their lives. This collection was selected by Janet Burroway for the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. The author's stories have appeared in such magazines as The Iowa Review and The Massachusetts Review, and have garnered awards including a Pushcart Prize. He chairs the Communication Department at Loyola College in Baltimore. This is his first book.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Tanner's style is his subtle handling of wrenching emotions. In "Still Life," a sixty-seven-year-old man poses as a nude model for a class of college painters, as he struggles to cope with his wife's death. Suddenly, it starts hailing and the students become concerned that the skylight won't hold. Tanner manages to take the near-cliché of shattered glass as a stand-in for traumatic event and reinvest it with its original frightening beauty.
The collection's last story, "The Day His Wife's Face Froze," encapsulates the main driving forces of the entire collection. In it, a husband is forced to confront what his wife's Bell's Palsy may portend. The story is filled with a sense of isolation. It is up to the individual to make sense of what is given. During an art project with his sixth graders, the husband has made a mask of Fate's face. It frightens the children and later he wonders what someone would think looking at it: "What could have possessed the maker to create such a face, that drowsy right side, that odd half-smile?" With that question, the collection ends, mirroring perfectly the faces of all of the characters who find themselves pulled between conflicting emotions and situations, as all the while they forge ahead, attempting to smile.
This is a surprisingly strong first collection. Tanner's subject matter is explored with compassion and an unwavering eye. He falters only in some of his last lines, where he seems to try too hard to underline the story's point. However, these are mere hiccups in an otherwise confident voice. Overwhelmingly, the stories drive forward, striking a realistic balance between hope and despair, beautifully elucidating the fact that, though fractured, people can still stand.
---Naomi Millan
from Mid-American Review: link to Mid-American Review
Winner of the G.S. Sharat Chandra Award, Ron Tanner's debut collection of stories, A Bed of Nails, is an exercise in eclecticism. Tanner's tales evoke a variety of themes, some familiar-spousal cancer and midlife isolationism-as well as ideas that could be described as "fresher," such as a stuntman finding his Stanislavsky moment and a futuristic wartime recycling drive. We meet artists, an artist's nude model, garbage bargemen, an aging drummer, many a spurned lover, and the guy in the gorilla costume for any movie necessitating a gorilla made pre-CGI.
The collection could, basically, be cut into two different parts: stories, and the stories from the futuristic revolutionary war. The non-war stories are able to find a balance between the creative instincts of Tanner and an emotional resonance felt by his reader. "The Ape in Me," for example, tells the story of Chris, a UCLA dropout who found a niche as Hollywood's guy in the gorilla suit. Over the years, Chris has expanded his horizons to slashers and zombie-types, often called upon to mangle perky girls a quarter his age. It is in the grayed actor's search for new motivation that Tanner finds the warmth of his character and the heart of his story, making his reader care more for his hero's plight than movie audiences could for his countless screen victims.
In a collection already marked by unpredictable turns, the four stories taking place in Tanner's grim but tongue-not-so-in-cheek vision of the future take the collection to another level of surprising. Peppered throughout the book, these pieces follow the exploits of a family of sixteen weathering the attempted overthrow of an inventor turned president turned tyrant. The first of these tales, "A Handful of Nails," opens with the family's matriarch, Sofi, revealing, "Unbeknownst to the children, I added wood shavings to their turnip stew last night: pine to be exact. . . ." On her end of the war, she must scavenge for food for her army of offspring, while at the same time defend her bombed-out home (in what was once the tech corridor) from the local metal scrounger, a hapless, sweet boy with eyes on her one remaining over rack. The family's eldest, Lofe, has followed his father in the Revolutionary Militia, and in "You're a Sergeant," the boy recalls the President's love of Gregory Peck, describing the star as
. . . the actor He adored most and wanted to emulate, someone tall and righteous like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, which the President remade as TKM II, starring the President Himself, with new dialogue He wrote Himself-we children were required to memorize all of His lines by the time we were ten.
While these stories don't say much for Capitalism or the Americans who die for it, they are the highlight of the collection, making you wish the war would never end.
A Bed of Nails is a wonderfully entertaining book from a writer whose imagination is able to look in just about any direction. It is an impressive debut, and a reader comes away assured that Ron Tanner's future is far less bleak than that found in his fiction.
----Michael Czyzniejewski
Short Stories Offer Offbeat Characters (fromThe Pilot)
A well made short story is a wondrous thing and Ron Tanner's stories in this collection are very well made. In these 13 stories previously published in small literary quarterlies from New Letters, Indiana Review, Iowa Review to Writers' Forum and others, Tanner has a virtuoso range. The voices of his narrators go from a wistful clerk in the shopping mall to an unnamed outer galaxy where metal is the prized medium and children in Fagan-like scavenger hunts spend their days picking the dumps and the landfills of this world. Even here, the realistic details are enough to raise goosebumps on the back of your neck.
Tanner is such a skilled wordsmith, he can go from male to female persona so convincingly you check to see you're still reading the same book you laid aside last night. (Short stories make perfect bedtime reading. You never have to backtrack to get to where you left off.) And its' rare that a male writer can get inside the skin of the opposite sex so real that there's not a little voice in the back of your head saying, "Who do you think you're kidding?" Tanner is able to so tightly focus his stories that the world of his narrator becomes your world. You live in it totally from the first word to the last in each of these stories.
In these character-driven stories, Tanner takes you inside into the world of a worker on a floating garbage barge, an elderly male artist's model, an out-of-work musician who pawns part of his livelihood to try to win back the respect, if not love, of his Las Vegas "Live in," a Hollywood stunt man whose best parts had always been in an ape costume, or an experimental story, "An Act in Three Plays," in which a man must confront his ex-sex-therapist with a child molestation charge. Wow! Didn't I tell you there's a range I haven't seen rivaled in awhile. And he knows how to hook a reader hard in the first few lines of an opening. Take "high Heat for Cotton," the shopping mall clerk story, which begins, "This is what she knew: He worked at Britches, where he got a twenty-percent discount on clothes but not on shoes. He was a buttoned-down oxford and khaki kind of guy, always in loafers, never in wingtips and never sockless. White or navy crews mostly. She had watched him every evening, five to nine, from her station at Casual Corner, where she got a ten-percent discount." Or the startling opening of "Red Shoes," which is "By the time I got through the forest, the revolution was over and the President, his wife and his lieutenant were swinging by their necks from the lion-faced gargoyles of the cathedral."
"A Bed of Nails" won the first annual G. S. Sharat Chandra Award from BookMark Press, which has been publishing books of poetry and short stories since 1971.
Ron Tanner is an honors graduate from the Creative Writing Program at UNC-CH, who has published over 40 stories and is now teaching at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD. He dedicated "Nails" to Max Steele, "a teacher who made a difference." Tanner went through the UNC-CH program before I joined the creative writing faculty. I hope someday I'll have a student dedicate such a book (and tribute) to me.
There isn't a finer collection out there than this one.
--- Ruth Moose (5-9-04)
RAIN TAXI: link to RAIN TAXI
Ron Tanner's debut story collection presents an interesting and timely juxtaposition of moods and genres: straightforward realism mingles with dystopian surrealism to portray a near future of poverty and violent revolution. In his realistic mode, Tanner is straightforward without being simplistic--a balance that is always harder to achieve than it looks. The characters that inhabit a recognizable present wrangle with illness, death, and infidelity, and they cope through unlikely if not bizarre means. Dom, the widower protagonist of "still Life," poses nude for an art class. The Narrator's mother in "A Model Family" buys her children a complex submarine model kid to distract them --and herself--from a father's absence.
However the characters choose to cope, thought, they can never escape their often conflicted feelings. Cooper, for example, confronts an unsettling truth toward the end of the title story. As his artistic career meets with increasing success, he finds it harder to empathize with his seriously ill wife. "His success, his head-swimming gratitude for the clamorous attention his wok had brought him in a single nights' showing, should have been tainted thoroughly by the dreadful prospect Sarah faced."
The richness of Tanner's realism is complemented in the dystopian episodes, which center on a family trying to survive a civil war set in what seems to be an America of the future divided between rival militias. Beleaguered civilians subsist by hoarding scrap metal; in a moment reminiscent of the satirical wit of George Saunders, one family trades a steel wash basin for "two week's ration of cheese-food concentrate, a quart of milk substitute, and five pounds of National Toffee." The contrast of modes is at first jarring, but ultimately A Bed of Nails imbues the everyday with a shell shock that feels all too familiar.
--Pedro Ponce
With cover art representing twisted, piercing fish hooks, this collection of thirteen short stories seems to promise sharp menace and pain. What arises through the movement of the collection, however, is a striking portrait of survival in the face of an overwhelming world. The characters who people these stories are always just barely in control, yet somehow they manage to remain afloat in the flotsam of their lives. This collection was selected by Janet Burroway for the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. The author's stories have appeared in such magazines as The Iowa Review and The Massachusetts Review, and have garnered awards including a Pushcart Prize. He chairs the Communication Department at Loyola College in Baltimore. This is his first book.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Tanner's style is his subtle handling of wrenching emotions. In "Still Life," a sixty-seven-year-old man poses as a nude model for a class of college painters, as he struggles to cope with his wife's death. Suddenly, it starts hailing and the students become concerned that the skylight won't hold. Tanner manages to take the near-cliché of shattered glass as a stand-in for traumatic event and reinvest it with its original frightening beauty.
The collection's last story, "The Day His Wife's Face Froze," encapsulates the main driving forces of the entire collection. In it, a husband is forced to confront what his wife's Bell's Palsy may portend. The story is filled with a sense of isolation. It is up to the individual to make sense of what is given. During an art project with his sixth graders, the husband has made a mask of Fate's face. It frightens the children and later he wonders what someone would think looking at it: "What could have possessed the maker to create such a face, that drowsy right side, that odd half-smile?" With that question, the collection ends, mirroring perfectly the faces of all of the characters who find themselves pulled between conflicting emotions and situations, as all the while they forge ahead, attempting to smile.
This is a surprisingly strong first collection. Tanner's subject matter is explored with compassion and an unwavering eye. He falters only in some of his last lines, where he seems to try too hard to underline the story's point. However, these are mere hiccups in an otherwise confident voice. Overwhelmingly, the stories drive forward, striking a realistic balance between hope and despair, beautifully elucidating the fact that, though fractured, people can still stand.
---Naomi Millan
from Mid-American Review: link to Mid-American Review
Winner of the G.S. Sharat Chandra Award, Ron Tanner's debut collection of stories, A Bed of Nails, is an exercise in eclecticism. Tanner's tales evoke a variety of themes, some familiar-spousal cancer and midlife isolationism-as well as ideas that could be described as "fresher," such as a stuntman finding his Stanislavsky moment and a futuristic wartime recycling drive. We meet artists, an artist's nude model, garbage bargemen, an aging drummer, many a spurned lover, and the guy in the gorilla costume for any movie necessitating a gorilla made pre-CGI.
The collection could, basically, be cut into two different parts: stories, and the stories from the futuristic revolutionary war. The non-war stories are able to find a balance between the creative instincts of Tanner and an emotional resonance felt by his reader. "The Ape in Me," for example, tells the story of Chris, a UCLA dropout who found a niche as Hollywood's guy in the gorilla suit. Over the years, Chris has expanded his horizons to slashers and zombie-types, often called upon to mangle perky girls a quarter his age. It is in the grayed actor's search for new motivation that Tanner finds the warmth of his character and the heart of his story, making his reader care more for his hero's plight than movie audiences could for his countless screen victims.
In a collection already marked by unpredictable turns, the four stories taking place in Tanner's grim but tongue-not-so-in-cheek vision of the future take the collection to another level of surprising. Peppered throughout the book, these pieces follow the exploits of a family of sixteen weathering the attempted overthrow of an inventor turned president turned tyrant. The first of these tales, "A Handful of Nails," opens with the family's matriarch, Sofi, revealing, "Unbeknownst to the children, I added wood shavings to their turnip stew last night: pine to be exact. . . ." On her end of the war, she must scavenge for food for her army of offspring, while at the same time defend her bombed-out home (in what was once the tech corridor) from the local metal scrounger, a hapless, sweet boy with eyes on her one remaining over rack. The family's eldest, Lofe, has followed his father in the Revolutionary Militia, and in "You're a Sergeant," the boy recalls the President's love of Gregory Peck, describing the star as
. . . the actor He adored most and wanted to emulate, someone tall and righteous like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, which the President remade as TKM II, starring the President Himself, with new dialogue He wrote Himself-we children were required to memorize all of His lines by the time we were ten.
While these stories don't say much for Capitalism or the Americans who die for it, they are the highlight of the collection, making you wish the war would never end.
A Bed of Nails is a wonderfully entertaining book from a writer whose imagination is able to look in just about any direction. It is an impressive debut, and a reader comes away assured that Ron Tanner's future is far less bleak than that found in his fiction.
----Michael Czyzniejewski
Short Stories Offer Offbeat Characters (fromThe Pilot)
A well made short story is a wondrous thing and Ron Tanner's stories in this collection are very well made. In these 13 stories previously published in small literary quarterlies from New Letters, Indiana Review, Iowa Review to Writers' Forum and others, Tanner has a virtuoso range. The voices of his narrators go from a wistful clerk in the shopping mall to an unnamed outer galaxy where metal is the prized medium and children in Fagan-like scavenger hunts spend their days picking the dumps and the landfills of this world. Even here, the realistic details are enough to raise goosebumps on the back of your neck.
Tanner is such a skilled wordsmith, he can go from male to female persona so convincingly you check to see you're still reading the same book you laid aside last night. (Short stories make perfect bedtime reading. You never have to backtrack to get to where you left off.) And its' rare that a male writer can get inside the skin of the opposite sex so real that there's not a little voice in the back of your head saying, "Who do you think you're kidding?" Tanner is able to so tightly focus his stories that the world of his narrator becomes your world. You live in it totally from the first word to the last in each of these stories.
In these character-driven stories, Tanner takes you inside into the world of a worker on a floating garbage barge, an elderly male artist's model, an out-of-work musician who pawns part of his livelihood to try to win back the respect, if not love, of his Las Vegas "Live in," a Hollywood stunt man whose best parts had always been in an ape costume, or an experimental story, "An Act in Three Plays," in which a man must confront his ex-sex-therapist with a child molestation charge. Wow! Didn't I tell you there's a range I haven't seen rivaled in awhile. And he knows how to hook a reader hard in the first few lines of an opening. Take "high Heat for Cotton," the shopping mall clerk story, which begins, "This is what she knew: He worked at Britches, where he got a twenty-percent discount on clothes but not on shoes. He was a buttoned-down oxford and khaki kind of guy, always in loafers, never in wingtips and never sockless. White or navy crews mostly. She had watched him every evening, five to nine, from her station at Casual Corner, where she got a ten-percent discount." Or the startling opening of "Red Shoes," which is "By the time I got through the forest, the revolution was over and the President, his wife and his lieutenant were swinging by their necks from the lion-faced gargoyles of the cathedral."
"A Bed of Nails" won the first annual G. S. Sharat Chandra Award from BookMark Press, which has been publishing books of poetry and short stories since 1971.
Ron Tanner is an honors graduate from the Creative Writing Program at UNC-CH, who has published over 40 stories and is now teaching at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD. He dedicated "Nails" to Max Steele, "a teacher who made a difference." Tanner went through the UNC-CH program before I joined the creative writing faculty. I hope someday I'll have a student dedicate such a book (and tribute) to me.
There isn't a finer collection out there than this one.
--- Ruth Moose (5-9-04)
RAIN TAXI: link to RAIN TAXI
Ron Tanner's debut story collection presents an interesting and timely juxtaposition of moods and genres: straightforward realism mingles with dystopian surrealism to portray a near future of poverty and violent revolution. In his realistic mode, Tanner is straightforward without being simplistic--a balance that is always harder to achieve than it looks. The characters that inhabit a recognizable present wrangle with illness, death, and infidelity, and they cope through unlikely if not bizarre means. Dom, the widower protagonist of "still Life," poses nude for an art class. The Narrator's mother in "A Model Family" buys her children a complex submarine model kid to distract them --and herself--from a father's absence.
However the characters choose to cope, thought, they can never escape their often conflicted feelings. Cooper, for example, confronts an unsettling truth toward the end of the title story. As his artistic career meets with increasing success, he finds it harder to empathize with his seriously ill wife. "His success, his head-swimming gratitude for the clamorous attention his wok had brought him in a single nights' showing, should have been tainted thoroughly by the dreadful prospect Sarah faced."
The richness of Tanner's realism is complemented in the dystopian episodes, which center on a family trying to survive a civil war set in what seems to be an America of the future divided between rival militias. Beleaguered civilians subsist by hoarding scrap metal; in a moment reminiscent of the satirical wit of George Saunders, one family trades a steel wash basin for "two week's ration of cheese-food concentrate, a quart of milk substitute, and five pounds of National Toffee." The contrast of modes is at first jarring, but ultimately A Bed of Nails imbues the everyday with a shell shock that feels all too familiar.
--Pedro Ponce
