Book Review : Tex Gresham - Violent Candy (2023)
My dad told me that at a certain age you started looking at part of your life you once chose to ignore. (Violent Candy, p. 77)
When you read as much as I do, what happens is that your tastes become quite precise. You don't always know what you’re looking for, but you recognize it when you find it. Wayward one-man indie press House of Vlad has often delivered these unexpected, troublemaking voices that make me feel like life is worth living, but they never quite delivered someone like Tex Gresham before. I don’t read short story collections all that much anymore, but I’m glad as fuck Gresham's Violent Candy landed on my desk.
Violent Candy features sixteen short stories from one of the most earnest, but sneakily sensitive and nuanced voices I've read in a long time. Tex Gresham is blunt, but he's not a shock value guy. The straightforwardness of his stories conceal an emotional complexity and an inner turmoil that challenge you to invest your own personal truth in his characters. They feel real, intimate, like voices from your own past. As it is often the case for collections, not every story hits equally hard, but the ratio is pretty great.
Owen's got his mom's dildo in his hand. He's crying a little bit. We're sitting in the parking lot of a sex shop crammed between a bail bondsman and a jewelry store. The kind of place where all windows have bars and we've just been robbed. I want to turn to Owen and say I think I took this too far but all that comes out is: "You've got your mom's pubes on your shirt."
He vomits. (Inside Joke, p. 43)
My favorite story in the collection was Inside Joke, which starts as somewhat of an American Pie-era dirty teenage story, which sharply turns halfway into a heartbreaking tale first grief. The genius and efficiency of this short story lies in the narrator's struggle with his own emotions while recalling it. He eschews the most important point of his own story for the more fun stuff in order to spare himself and therefore creates en entire lore around a difficult topic that should've been straightforward.
This is a very "dude" thing, but my kings reading this will know what I'm talking about: the best way to discuss painful event often is to run circles around it and use some kind of device to filter your feelings though and Inside Joke hits all the right beats in that regard. Hurt People Hurt People is a shorter, more direct story that uses allegory in order to discuss suffering and death. The story itself is not allegorical at all, it's about a suicidal dude, but the allegory it uses to discuss his suffering is gut wrenching.
Lovebird is the other story that tugged my heartstrings straight was Lovebird, which is set inside a gated community for the elderly. The protagonist feels lonely and forlorn, but nevertheless begins a quest to connect himself to his humanity back again. This is a more luminous story than most of Violent Candy's catalogue to be honest as it celebrates in its own way, the radical freedom that comes with losing everything. That when you're old an brittle, you're finally allowed to be a weirdo.
It isn't NOT sad, but isn't heartbreaking like the other two.
You’ve got a thing inside you.
It grows like a weed but screams: "Hate things you shouldn't". You have a partner, a kid, a place to live, a good job — even time for you to pursue hobbies. Things are good.
Except you're miserable. You find ways to make others miserable: locking yourself in a room during the day, spending nights driving around the city alone. Being with your family feels like a chore you never want to do. Your dad used to do things like this. (Hurt People Hurt People, p. 91)
The title story of Violent Candy leans more on the brutal side, but courageously explores the psychological underpinnings of what sometimes leads people to do sick shit. Once again Tex Gresham uses an outside point of view in order to make his point more vivid, a storytelling device that I love. A good short story leaves you filling the gaps this is what happens here. In Sickness & In Sickness is another one where your own moral compass is brought in to complete the story and it addressed themes I love.
Stain is another heartfelt, human exploration of deviant feelings that I loved. It has this Black Mirror-esque double-edged irony to it. Tex Gresham never treats inner darkness like an object of desire, but rather like an annoying passenger your need to deal with in other to survive, which makes his stories so lively and memorable. Footage of the Aftermath is probably the last story in the bunch really stood out to me as it addresses quite common feelings of frustration and powerlessness in the adult age.
*
Tex Gresham is like that dude you used to know in another life. That one you went on slightly (sometimes very) dangerous adventures with when you were in college or at the beginning of your adult life. You miss that dude, but you secretly wish that he found a better sense of happiness and stability that what he once had. That's what reading Violent Candy feels like. It triggers a weird nostalgia for a time in your life where you had nothing, but also had everything to gain. One of my favorites of 2023.
