In the spirit of Kafka and Hunter S. Thompson, James Hanna presents twenty-one tales of darkness, wry humor, and cryptic light. Most have been published in various parts of the internet or perhaps even in a different universe. They vary from the weirdly sci-fi (I Am Not a Crook) to realistic situations. Publisher’s favorite is The World Baseball League. You never know what’s coming at you when … when you read James Hanna.
more
Oh,wow!
Strange off the wall tales!
Weird!
Short, dark, witty tales, with shocking, raw, colorful characters, and peppered with unnecessary cuss words!
Some how, they draw you in and you can’t stop reading them!
Find out for your self.
Thank you Online Book Club for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
Shackles and More Gripping Tales is a creative mix of short stories. With a wide variety of genres mixed in, you’re sure to find at least a few stories that you enjoy. Travel through the day to day of various probation officers, and the difficult choices they must make. Or take a tour of the afterworld, reliving past regrets and hopes. You can even visit dystopian alternate realities, or relive childhood memories.
Shackles and More Gripping Tales is an anthology of stories by James Hanna, some of which have been previously published in a variety of publications. I’m not sure why, but when I read the blurb of the book, something about it intrigued me.
My favorite of all the stories was The Time My Dad Chewed Out A Coo.” I thought that it was going to be somewhat serious. It definitely was not. It was one of the most hilarious things I’ve read in a while. I think the reasoning for that is because it was so unexpected.
The story is about “Toby” and his father. They are out shooting at rats which they tally “‘cause that makes it bonding.” His dad, while taking a break and asks his son if he’d ever told him this particular story. Toby in return is “tell me about it Pa,” as if he hadn’t heard it many times before. According to Toby, “you can’t tell a good story to often” so his father begins to recount the night he and his wife were pulled over leaving a wedding while they argued.
As the story unfurls, I find myself in tears as I am laughing and the foolery unraveling on my kindle in front of me. As the story concluded, I had to take a few moments to gather myself before I could continue with the next story. All I could think of in that moment is that I wouldn’t mind listening to that story each time it came up either. Aside from some of less than P.C. word choices of course.
I also really enjoyed four others for one reason or another that included Sam the Poontang Man; I’m Going to Kick Some Ass and; Busting Willie Brown.
Sam the Poontang Man Although his slogans and sketches were extremely sexist, among a slew of other “-ists,” they were still creatively entertaining
I’m Going to Kick Some Ass in which a parole officer and his client go back and forth over the course of her probation in a way that one can’t help but be entertained by. At one point the parolee, Lorena asks “but why do I gotta be sensible while the law gets to play the fool?” I thought this an intriguing question. I also found it interesting that the whole “snitches get stitches” mentality and someone being loyal to a fault was so prominent as it is a very real reality.
Busting Willie Brown in which the same character from many of the other stories, Thomas (Tom) Hemming is talking Tom another former cop about a bust from his past. Now this particular story was not my favorite. What I found funny, simply because of its random placement, was the mispronunciation of Annette Funicello as “Funny Jello” by Roscoe, the cop recounting the arrest story.
All in all, I liked this book but really only truly enjoyed a handful of the stories. That is not to discredit the work as a whole. If not taken too seriously, which I rarely do, there is potentially something for everyone. Whether it be a full story, a mere quote or idea. There are moments that make you question your own way of thinking, that offer pure shock value, stun you, or just give you side stitches as you laugh until you cry.
When I started reading, I didn’t know what to expect. I found the characters relatable in some way. Many of the stories too are realistic and could easily have been written by a relative, friend or neighbor of the reader.
Voluntarily reviewed after I received a free copy of this book courtesy of Voracious Readers and the author, James Hanna, in exchange for my honest review.
Shackles and More Gripping Tales, James Hanna’s latest book, a collection of twenty-one stories, provides a wild—sometimes dark, more often, witty—ride for the reader. Hanna comfortably spans a wide spectrum of voices, male and female, first person or third, a diversity of ages, different regions in the US, and different genres. His characters are all, however, in various ways, vulnerable and most frequently from the lower rung of the social classes. His stories are filled with wry humor, sometimes the result of the narrator, sometimes the characters’ own particular idiom. Hanna’s stories complicate gender relationships with an overlay of the harsh realities of the politics in which we live where the small, usually damaged people—men and women—for all their big dreaming and bravado—will, even in the midst of momentary success, never ultimately beat the big system. And thus Hanna’s stories both fully incorporate their locale, drawing his readers in and getting us to sympathize with his colorful characters—and also transcend it to critique the system that keeps them small and implicates his readers in that critique. This combination, to me, is the core and cleverness of Hanna’s writing.
“The Sugar Shack Dress Company,” for example, features Gerty McDowell who married too young, becomes disappointed with life where “you can only buy so many lottery tickets” and attempts to make a living with her one real talent, sewing. (The original Gerty McDowell from James Joyce’s Ulysses is obsessed with clothing, make up and her general appearance, and after a parodic-erotic scene is revealed to be lame which is a real turn off to the man observing her.) Our Gerty creates a website with “sample frocks” which gets her nowhere until she is invited to join the “Sugar Shack,” a “rapidly growing company with outlets all over the world” and sew dresses to her heart’s content. Hanna’s writing encourages the reader to simultaneously root for Gerty and anticipate her downfall whether we know the original Gerty or not. We watch her creativity build until she creates a dress she feels “truly looked” like it “had been touched by the hand of God.” Her newfound confidence, coupled with the approbation of the “Sugar Shack…quality inspection,” even causes her to challenge her husband, Benny. We feel the power of her voice as she notes that “Benny had nothing to offer me but beer and Fantasy Baseball” and she buys him off with a flat screen TV and a case of Bud and goes off to hand deliver dress upon dress after each is inspected by Sugar Shack. As her bank account builds, so does the reader’s tension, fearing all this can’t last, not for a character like Gerty. And it doesn’t. No spoilers in this review, but enough to say that once again, it’s the lower-class person—who blames herself for being “dumber than broccoli”—who suffers.
In “The Summer of Love,” a probation officer develops an unusual relationship with his Tarot card reading, pot selling, manic depressive parolee from the Tenderloin District who “embodied the best of the hippie phenomenon.” He keeps telling her that all her life, “she deserved better.” But the story refuses sentimentality of any sort. She calls him on “trying to play the hero” and cautions him not to “be so self-righteous” and gets him to feed her cat. The ending takes the reader aback, a grim reminder of how social class frequently plays out.
“The Hangings” is a gothic tale, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” that once again, has hierarchy, not horror, at its center. The horror comes from the power structure. In “Little Darling,” a man is haunted by a female ghost whom he tries to release through chivalry, religion, and ultimate a self-conscious, “brutish” (his word) sexuality. He becomes a “pig” and drives a “dick mobile” but he cannot be rid of or seemingly satisfy his ghost whom he names “Little Darling,” who invokes in him feelings of the insufficiency of his Hugh Hefner persona. With her cryptic and inscrutable lines, “You’re all I have …You’re all I’ll ever have,” the ghost haunts the reader as well as the main character with an awareness of the inadequate definitions of masculinity the circulate in the dominant culture.
In “Sam the Poontang Man,” we meet Sam, a burned out Iraqi vet, who tries to beat the system by selling soda—“Sheeit, it ain’t even illegal”—with suspect promises about its aphrodisiac qualities. Sam may remind readers of Pomeroy in Hanna’s earlier Call Me Pomeroy (2015) superficially notable for his many politically incorrect attitudes to women, but, like Call Me Pomeroy, “Sam the Poontang Man” offers an uproarious and multi-layered critique of capitalism and “the American way.”
Hanna is an erudite writer—his work is filled with references to such classical figures as Dorian Gray, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Lord Byron, Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest, Jacob Marley from Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, Renoir, Neitzsche, Orwell. Gerty McDowell from Ulysses. The list could go on. But these references are slipped in lightly and while a college professor like this reader finds they add an extra layer of richness to the stories, readers will get by fine if they don’t pick up on them or only recognize a few. What all readers will be keenly aware of is the high-speed, idiomatic range and quality of Hanna’s writing.
Extensive in his range of topics, settings, characters, and genres, this collection will delight and disturb readers. And while there are a lot of stories in the volume, you’ll still want more from this gifted writer who speaks for the little guys who dream big because they are American.