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hsienhsien27's review
4.0
This was sent to me in exchange for an honest review
All Due Respect has been publishing noir and hitting the genre repeatedly until it bleeds and smiles at them with crooked teeth. Yeah, really hard. They're busting up the Kindle tops with pride.This collection consisted of mostly lower middle class or poor people getting into super difficult situations or ending in death or embarrassment. Of course, since it is noir, those people have committed crimes or are in a situation where one takes place.
"The creak of your car door slices into your ears and carves canyons in your bones. Did you think the girl at the Kwik Trip would look at you twice?"
But crime, cusses, and bloodshed isn't the only thing in this story collection. Foolish love, wasted love, missed opportunities, and regrets plague the backgrounds of each story. There is immorality in the air, but somewhere in there is a little speck of humanity floating around, it probably landed in your ear drum or in your throat and you coughed it out. What I meant was that it's a little hard to see.
Noir is kind of a weird genre and I noticed that while reading this collection. It's a type of literature that works sort of like a thriller, where the reader is absorbed into a world filled with deviances and it makes them sweat and jitter, but it also has a human condition or "literary fiction," aspect where the character measures their misfortunes with their fortunate moments, and then decide on whether or not everything is as bad as they thought it was. (Along with my lack grammar rules on this blog.)
"Well, Nikki, truth be told, this really isn't your country. We tolerate you, when we don't need the entertainment you provide, we send you back home or lay you down with the worms."
Religion is also thrown in here too, much like Jake Hinkson's The Deepening Shade. In the noir world, religion always seems to be that one huge conflict that just leaves everything shredded in five different shapes. Most of those shapes are guilty hypocrites. It dedicates what is right and wrong over and over in the ears to make a hypnosis that turns quite hypnotic, until it wears off, making a rabid beast. I'm talking about the story, "A Moral Majority," where a priest gets an abortion for a young pregnant lover. He didn't really commit violence, but he in a sense did, because he killed off life and betrayed all of the commandments of his church.
"He closed his eyes and imagined himself a giant, stomping across the Minnesota countryside, cracking the Earth with every step."
Crooked Roads is a collection of confessing all of the crimes people dream up in their heads of doing, but never actually do it. Instead, they project the fantasy in Grand Theft Auto. And if they ever do, they buckle down or get a whip to the behind. It has its humor here and there, due to some characters being sort of pathetic, but at the same, in their foolishness and unfortunate circumstances, you learn to empathize. Go outside or watch the news and then try to picture every detail, understand the deviance and motive of these crimes. The collection manages to entertain but also give that warm feeling (I sound like a masochist,) of knowing and experiencing something. Because noir is not just thrills and gunshots, well most of it kind of is from what I've seen so far, but Crooked Roads contained both the trope of noir, that I've seen so far, but also the "literary," qualities. It contains the observations of people falling into deep holes of either "Whoa, you messed up big time, I kind of feel bad for you, here's a bit of mercy" or "Dude, you're such a jerk, so now here's your flip."
Favorite stories in the collection:
A Moral Majority
Little People
American Chivalry
No Hard Feelings
Columbas Day
Rating: 4/5
Originally posted here: http://wordsnotesandfiction.blogspot.com/2015/05/crooked-roads-by-alec-cizak-advanced.html
All Due Respect has been publishing noir and hitting the genre repeatedly until it bleeds and smiles at them with crooked teeth. Yeah, really hard. They're busting up the Kindle tops with pride.This collection consisted of mostly lower middle class or poor people getting into super difficult situations or ending in death or embarrassment. Of course, since it is noir, those people have committed crimes or are in a situation where one takes place.
"The creak of your car door slices into your ears and carves canyons in your bones. Did you think the girl at the Kwik Trip would look at you twice?"
But crime, cusses, and bloodshed isn't the only thing in this story collection. Foolish love, wasted love, missed opportunities, and regrets plague the backgrounds of each story. There is immorality in the air, but somewhere in there is a little speck of humanity floating around, it probably landed in your ear drum or in your throat and you coughed it out. What I meant was that it's a little hard to see.
Noir is kind of a weird genre and I noticed that while reading this collection. It's a type of literature that works sort of like a thriller, where the reader is absorbed into a world filled with deviances and it makes them sweat and jitter, but it also has a human condition or "literary fiction," aspect where the character measures their misfortunes with their fortunate moments, and then decide on whether or not everything is as bad as they thought it was. (Along with my lack grammar rules on this blog.)
"Well, Nikki, truth be told, this really isn't your country. We tolerate you, when we don't need the entertainment you provide, we send you back home or lay you down with the worms."
Religion is also thrown in here too, much like Jake Hinkson's The Deepening Shade. In the noir world, religion always seems to be that one huge conflict that just leaves everything shredded in five different shapes. Most of those shapes are guilty hypocrites. It dedicates what is right and wrong over and over in the ears to make a hypnosis that turns quite hypnotic, until it wears off, making a rabid beast. I'm talking about the story, "A Moral Majority," where a priest gets an abortion for a young pregnant lover. He didn't really commit violence, but he in a sense did, because he killed off life and betrayed all of the commandments of his church.
"He closed his eyes and imagined himself a giant, stomping across the Minnesota countryside, cracking the Earth with every step."
Crooked Roads is a collection of confessing all of the crimes people dream up in their heads of doing, but never actually do it. Instead, they project the fantasy in Grand Theft Auto. And if they ever do, they buckle down or get a whip to the behind. It has its humor here and there, due to some characters being sort of pathetic, but at the same, in their foolishness and unfortunate circumstances, you learn to empathize. Go outside or watch the news and then try to picture every detail, understand the deviance and motive of these crimes. The collection manages to entertain but also give that warm feeling (I sound like a masochist,) of knowing and experiencing something. Because noir is not just thrills and gunshots, well most of it kind of is from what I've seen so far, but Crooked Roads contained both the trope of noir, that I've seen so far, but also the "literary," qualities. It contains the observations of people falling into deep holes of either "Whoa, you messed up big time, I kind of feel bad for you, here's a bit of mercy" or "Dude, you're such a jerk, so now here's your flip."
Favorite stories in the collection:
A Moral Majority
Little People
American Chivalry
No Hard Feelings
Columbas Day
Rating: 4/5
Originally posted here: http://wordsnotesandfiction.blogspot.com/2015/05/crooked-roads-by-alec-cizak-advanced.html
articulatemadness's review
5.0
Crooked Roads is the brutal life in Indianapolis (at least I'm going to say it feels like it) that you don't want to find yourself down ever. One wrong turn can get you caught up; one right turn can leave you dead. Or for dead. Life in Crooked Roads is darker than anything happening in a Donald Goines' Detroit, filled with the cousins he left behind in the 1970s that discovered new and improved ways to be immoral people as a means of survival whether or not it translates good in practical use.
I'd consider this a dark noir. People are going to do something they shouldn't; it's a matter of when not if. And when they do it you know the sky will fall, somebody has to pay the piper, and somebody is not making it home to watch Monday Night Football. If you like short story anthologies, this one's a page turner.
I'd consider this a dark noir. People are going to do something they shouldn't; it's a matter of when not if. And when they do it you know the sky will fall, somebody has to pay the piper, and somebody is not making it home to watch Monday Night Football. If you like short story anthologies, this one's a page turner.
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