A disclaimer: I generally post reviews only after having read a good proportion of a story (at least 50%, if not everything posted). I’m not entirely sure how much of content I’ve read of Flesh Wounds but – to be honest – I’m not interested in reading more.

Flesh Wounds is a collection of stories examining the darker sides of life – prison, violence, crime, and so on. Given that there are very few short story collections out there, I thought I’d give this one a try, since you can only read so many serials simultaneously.

To start on the positive side, a strength of a short story collection like this one is that anyone can jump in and start reading, without feeling like they have backlogs of content to get through. And given that they are all of a similar genre, there is a certain coherency between posts.

But I have to say I was disappointed. The short stories themselves had little plot, jumping around in time, much more character-focused than plot-focused. Perhaps I have a wrong expectation of the genre, but I expected a lot more meat and action, rather than the copious telling that occurs.

I also found the writing style off-putting. The tone itself felt, to me, quite put on, like that of cheesy Mafia film with a voiceover telling you in a faux-Italian accent about how tough life is. [Update: Just to clarify, note that I am solely drawing a comparison, not stating that there is an Italian accent in the story itself.]

The tone strives to be involving, in that it is informal and aimed directly at the reader, however it falls short of being engaging, because it is very hard to get a sense of the narrator. Only the barest scraps of details about the narrator are given, in a rambling stream-of-consciousness style that jumps back and forth in time, which, as you can imagine, is quite hard to sink in to.

Then – something which I found jarring, given the rather informal tone – there is often a discrepancy between the narrator’s voice and the author’s, the latter sounding much more formal, particularly given the slightly unusual overuse of quotation marks. [A further clarification: I am not referring to dialogue here, but to the use of quotation marks in order to "heighlight" particular words, like so.]

That said, the writing does have the occasionally striking image, but I don’t think it is sufficient to compensate for the aspects of the writing which I didn’t enjoy. 

As for the website itself, the layout and colour scheme were fairly simple, clear and uncluttered – a definite strength. However, the lack of sequential navigation really aggravated me, in that it was hard to judge how much content I had read, and how much was left to read.

I do think that using tag cloud and categories is an interesting method of presentation, but I believe it should supplement a traditional table of contents, rather than replace it.

In short: kudos for the experimental style, very different from the average story up there. Unfortunately, the writing could have been better executed.

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At the author’s request, I had a look, and while I mostly agree with everything Anna said in her review, I did find the writing to be somewhat more successful than she did—hence my higher rating. 

The narrative voice is very strong and present, which is a great thing.  However, it does tend to ramble on in a manic, drug-addled, stream-of-consciousness sort of way, and I repeatedly found myself skimming, in spite of the strong voice.  The narrator seems more interested in his own discourse than whether or not he is holding his audience, and, perhaps as a result, he failed to hold my attention fairly regularly.

That said, I found the individual pieces interesting—they certainly communicate a world that is utterly foreign to me, and I appreciate that.  But, I think they’d be more effective at half the length.

If you like manic, raw, underside-of-life vignettes written in a strong voice, it’s worth a look.

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For me, reading Flesh Wounds was rather like being held hostage by one of Tarantino’s characters—there’s absolutely no way you know what is coming next.  In my book, that’s a good thing.

It’s different too, there’s no reading order of such, the reader can choose to click on the tag cloud [more . . .]

These stories are billed as previously published in newspapers and magazines, so I guess they aren’t really "web fiction", but you gotta wonder a little.

The word "noir" comes up a lot around these essays or tales or whatever they are.  And they are certainly dark.  Prison violence, murder, psychotic [more . . .]

I’d like to say something about the review from A. M. Harte

First of all, these are not "short stories".  I would have thought that obvious.  There is no "narrator/author" involved, no "plot".  Making a "sequential" TOC kind of silly since there is no sequence. There is no "faux Italian accent" (hard to say WHERE that came from) The idea that there is an "overuse of quotation marks" is bizarre.  These are columns with almost no dialogue. I wonder if any of it was actually read, frankly.  More on that below.

All of these columns are previously published.  They have won awards from regional organizations and national journalism associations.

But that really has little to do with this review, which is more of a "grudge hit" based on a feud off this site.  I would say that most people would realize this with the quickest reading of the material and invite readers to have a look and make up their own minds.

Perhaps this page is useful in understanding what the reviewer did not: http://hyperlit.adorobooks.com/fleshwounds/?page_id=2

Or this, from the publisher . . . which includes the really nice video and a link to the extremely innovative eBook version. http://adorobooks.com/bookwounds.php

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