Order STRANGIES AGAINST NATURE here
(also reviewed)
Order REPO SHARK here
This one kid, he used to tag everything in the complex with a Magic Marker - the same cryptic logo as on all his textbooks, his skateboard, plans for a tattoo. This criminal mastermind got caught tagging the laundry room by a ninety year old Hungarian widow. He tagged her face and stuffed her in a dryer, ransacked her house and ran off to LA.
It's tough to be young. A lot of people forget, but I remember what it was like.
Some days, I wake up and get behind the keyboard wondering why am I ever bothering writing a review about a certain book, because I really don't see who except me is insane enough to love it the way it should be. It wasn't the case last summer when I discovered Cody Goodfellow's uproarious novel REPO SHARK. which I thought was just an amazing, cartoonish and absurd crime comedy, but his short story collection STRATEGIES AGAINST NATURE is most definitely an acquired taste. It's the bizarre and unsettling journey of men who are trying to survive in a world that alienated them and left them behind.
STRATEGIES AGAINST NATURE is another spellbinding short story collection (I've read an abnormal amount of them in 2015), albeit it is definitely too sophisticated and ambitious for certain audiences. I'm not saying this in an elitist way, but some readers WILL take offense to a short story without a plot that focuses on esoteric concepts. My favorite story in the collection Waiting Room is the tremendous character study of a man who decided to wage war to the invisible forces around him. It's an incredibly rewarding story, but you have to read it with an open mind, almost like an essay on on spiritual warfare. It won't be everybody's cup of tea.
Perhaps the second best story in STRATEGIES AGAINST NATURE, and by far one of the most savage things I've ever read is At the Riding School. In that short, Cody Goodfellow transposes a Greek myth in a contemporary setting, which does all sort of thing to your perception. It's especially pertinent in the sense that it's a rape story that examines what happen if you leave the male intent out of the portrait. Goodfellow paints it as just a dark, animalistic impulse that destroys women *. I may be reading too much into it, but I thought my reading made At the Riding School one of the darkest, boldest and original things I've read all year.
The overarching theme of STRATEGIES AGAINST NATURE is men against their environment, but the range of the stories in the collection is so wide that it feels loosely interpreted. These are just great Cody Goodfellow stories. I've only went deeper into two of them, but there are several home runs in STRATEGIES AGAINST NATURE: What the Gods Eat, Wasted on the Young and Fat of the Land, from the top of my head also feel like entire universes in themselves. The writing of Cody Goodfellow has this effect on you though: it is as idiosyncratic as it is immersive. STRATEGIES AGAINST NATURE both feels like a great introduction to his work and a master class on his philosophy. It's really up to you to decide what to do with it. I know I've enjoyed it greatly.
* I'm not saying the story excuses men out of the act of raping or anything like that, but Cody Goodfellow just tunes the male variable out of his story to see what's going to happen. The issue is treated with the utmost respect, albeit a lot of originality. What does a rape story looks like with only women characters that aren't all friends? Gotta read this story to find out.
