Country: USA
Genre: Multiple
Pages: 152
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She began to scream from the depths of the soul that she had forgotten she possessed. I lifted my haze toward the stars and drank in the fear of the moment, and the freedom it brought.
MAYHEM is quite the fitting title for R. Thomas Brown's debut short story collection. He was always known to be a very eclectic writer and it makes absolute sense that his greatest hits reflects the scope of his ambition and talent. MAYHEM is a tornado of short, sharp stories that are meant to hurt you and broaden the spectrum of your perception. It tears everyday life out of its contexts and uses it as a weapon. My main complain when I review short stories collection is that it's now going anywhere precise. It's just a pile of stories that the author has put together without any particular purpose. MAYHEM doesn't suffer from that, despite that it has a wide array of genres. R. Thomas Brown writes about the wounds and the scars of peoples lives and he does it very well.
There are a few stories that hover above the average level of the collection and get my seal of excellence. THE HIT being my favorite of the lot. It's the most original hitman story I've read since Chris F. Holm's piece in PULP INK last year. Good, fresh hitman shorts are a rare bird. If you think of professional killers as these polite, cold-blooded type, you better think again because R. Thomas Brown's protagonist in THE HIT takes a vicious pleasure at his job. Don't get me wrong, the guy is cold-blooded, but think about him like a construction pro. Does his job and finds the little pleasures where he can. It's a brutal story and it's funny in every wrong way possible. Oh and it has a nice plot twist on top of the plot twist. So technically speaking, Mr. Brown is pretty sound and rather bold too.
The two other stories that crept under my skin were THE LESSON and A DIFFERENT COMMUNION. The first is one of those rare efforts I've seen from a write to get inside a psychopath's head and understand the logic of his thinking. It's very well achieved here as Brown illustrates the dichotomy in between "normal" and "normal for a psycho". The trap Brown doesn't fall into here is that his protagonist environment doesn't reflect his inner self. He's a psychopath that lives among healthy people in a seemingly healthy part of the world. That gives his actions infinitely more weight. A DIFFERENT COMMUNION is the story that is the best developed in the collection (the longest also, if I'm not mistaken). It illustrates the best in Brown's writing, protagonists who's lives are crumbling under the weight of their mistakes.
I waited while the kid told me his sob story about his imprisoned dad and how his mom was shacked up with some dude who paid for the house. I didn't care. The story kept going. One thing I knew is, the longer the story, the less the money.
It's sure that the fact that MAYHEM doesn't have a genre is particular is going to turn off some potential readers. The themes are very precise, but to classify this short story collection would be very difficult. Given that readers (and I'm including myself in this statement) have a tendency to select their readings by genre, it's going to hurt its popularity. But R. Thomas Brown is this kind of writer. He writes what's coming to him and is very little motivated by financial gain or popularity. What he writes best, in my honest opinion, is horror and it seems like it's coming to him more and more. After his novella MERCILESS PACT he released last year, he has HILL COUNTRY, coming up soon who seems to be written in the same vein. MAYHEM is tight and a lot of fun, but it's a little unfriendly to usage in its presentation. Read it though as it's going to give you a good sneak peak on an up-and-coming writer.
THREE STARS