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No matter how many layers of long underwear and denim I wear, the cold penetrates to the bone. No matter the shirts and the wool sweater, I am cold. And out of habit I still smoke on the porch, rain or shine, snow or heat.
Wanna start a fight between scrawny intellectuals? Bring a pen, one 8x11 sheet of paper and ask them to agree on a definition of noir that fits on the sheet. Should be enough to make it rain blood. It's a classic genre that doesn't believe in heroic or lawful figures, but it evolved quite a bit over the last two decades and the more contemporary nomenclature of neo-noir has much more complicated implications. Richard Thomas is a neo-noir writer. A quite talented one at that. You could even say he wrote the book about it. You will often find his name mentionned along the likes of Craig Clevenger, Will Christopher Baer, Stephen Graham Jones, Nik Korpon and Craig Wallwork, his associates of the much famed Velvet School. I've been a Richard Thomas fan for a couple of year, chasing his short stories down wherever he published them. I bought his short story collection HERNIATED ROOTS, published by the serviceable folks of Snubnose Press because I wanted another level of Thomas experience. It kind of worked.
Several stories stood out to me, but my favorite probably was RELEASED. It's difficult to undersand right away what it's about. For a few pages, I thought it was prose poetry. While it's meant to be a contemplative story, Thomas is slowly drawing shapes around the musings in this story, so that a storyline thread appears. RELEASED was clever and playful in its form, yet never lost its dramatic edge. SEEING RED is a story on the opposite spectrum of what Richard Thomas can do. The characters are shaped by the events, like a modern day Greek Tragedy. The themes are also very different. RELEASED is about identity while SEEING RED is about alienation and loss of meaning. Those two stories display Thomas' incredible range, sure, but they also act as outer limits as everything else in HERNIATED ROOTS falls in-between those themes.
I noticed something strange reading the collection. As broad and adventurous as HERNIATED ROOTS is meant to be, it highlights Richard Thomas' strengths. For example, he's at his best when narrating at the first person. His tone is warm and intimate. He is a master at exposing and exploiting the vulnerability of his characters, at using it for narrative purpose. I suppose that's why the fragmentary nature of HERNIATED ROOTS rubbed me the wrong way a little bit. Feeling like you're reading a samples catalogue is bound to happen whenever you're reading a gathered stories collection, but Richard Thomas' reckless explorations of narrative possibilities heightened that. It's a pet peeve of mine while reading short story collections. I hate reading long enough to establish a comfortable pace, then having to start over, again and again. Thomas' stories are great, but they can be dissonant, next to one another.
She haunts my dreams. I wake up coated in a sheen of sweat, a shadow passing in front of my apartment window. Cotton in my mouth, teeth marks on my chest, there is a stinging sensation up and down my back, my sheets dotted with blood. Mine or hers?
The first thing I did after finishing HERNIATED ROOTS was to purchase Richard Thomas' latest short story collection STARING INTO THE ABYSS. If that's not a token of my fanboyism, I don't know what is. Thomas is a unique writer, which a spin on human sensibility that is 100% his. As for every great author, it's difficult to pinpoint a genre on him, so I suppose the compound genre of neo-noir will have to do. I'm not too big on collections of stories gathered from magazines, because they have no common thread, but HERNIATED ROOTS broke my barriers more than once. Short stories can only carry you so far, though. They are fragmented and harder to talk about. I am still left yearing to read an entire novel populated with these beautiful, transcendant characters. If you don't know who Richard Thomas is, though, HERNIATED ROOTS is a great way to discover one of the most powerful contemporary voices.