Review by monicamu -- Illustrated Short Fiction of Willi...

[monicamu]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Illustrated Short Fiction of William H. Coles: 2000-2016" by William H. Coles.]

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4 out of 4 stars

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Illustrated Fiction of William H Coles: 2000-2016 is a book full of surprises. Apart from the variety of subject matter, including stories of painful events or situations that families sometimes have to deal with, there is also a variety of writing formats including short stories, illustrated fiction, and a novella.

The author has a unique way of probing into the most undesirable flaws in the human psyche, exploring and exploiting an individual's perversions.

Sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, the stories paint pictures of the characters by exposing their flaws.The images used are like nothing I've come across before, but there’s no doubt the words paint incredibly clear pictures e.g. ” They clump together like curdled cream” is used to describe a crowd. The images are so vivid that sometimes they seem to come to life with movement and surround sound as in a film, for example when Anwar describes his girlfriend’s house as follows: “memories of her ex-husband rustled around me in the walls like trapped rodents.”

The author varies his writing style depending both on the character being described, and on who is providing the description. Several of the stories are told in the first person. In these instances, I have left the errors unreported as they are perfectly in character with how that person would have spoken. This is often quite amusing. An example that brought a smile to my face being “she was an oh pear, or something.”

I am not terribly familiar with illustrated fiction so, while I think that the illustrations at the beginning of each short story served well to introduce the stories, the few illustrated fiction stories themselves did not add anything for me, particularly as they appeared to be repeats of stories I’d read earlier in the book. This did, however, make me wonder whether this might be an innovative technique the author uses to come up with new stories.

I can’t say that I enjoyed the stories themselves as they are a bit dark for me. What I liked least was the scene in “Crossing over” where a grandmother burns a child with a cigarette. Sensitive readers will likely be disturbed by this.

There is no doubt that every story is well written. What I enjoyed most were the superb examples of wordsmithing and the author’s obvious mastery of different writing formats.
It is not often that I’ve come across a modern author who demonstrates such a clear mastery of three different writing formats. This is no surprise as they require different skills. It’s quite clear that William H Coles is one such author. His choice of subject matter is not run-of-the-mill either. He seems to delight in probing human weaknesses, however painful this may be.

This is an author I’ll be looking out for.

There is some profanity and an erotic scene, so this is not suitable for young readers, but I have no hesitation in recommending this to adult readers and it deserves four out of four stars in spite of a few minor errors.

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Illustrated Short Fiction of William H. Coles: 2000-2016
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