Book Review 3.5 of 52: The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven by Rick Moody

I wanted to like this book, I really did. Personally I love Rick Moody. I've read a handful of his short stories and they're very good. At least the ones I read. This one reads like more of a b-sides or rarities collection, the stories that should have been buried away never to see the light of day.

The first story starts off alright, a man who records all of his wives phone calls who eventually gets caught. It's a decent start but goes downhill so fast after that. There's a story that's one freakishly long sentence. It may have been about two people filming a MTV Real World style reality show or some sort of indie film. I have no clue what was happening because it was all going by so fast like it was written on speed. Look, Kerouac did write On the Road on what ended up being a single sheet of paper but he had the decency to go through afterward and turn it into sentences and paragraphs.

The stories fall even further after that. James Dean survives (well actually dies but...well, it's hard to explain when you don't understand it) his tragic car wreck and joins a garage band. Then there's the title story which has something to do with a guy who goes around to sex shops and peek shows, but all I know is it's like Rick went on to Google, typed in "Sex fetishes" and wrote out a long list of it and called it a story. I didn't even make it to the end of that one, and making it halfway through was a struggle.

There's only been one other book that I couldn't read all the way through. That was Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. Every page just stank of pretentious bullshit. Not that it wasn't well written or anything, but it seems like David would have been the kind of person to brag about his extreme talent to everyone who had ears (All past tense because David hung himself last year).

Rick is a little different, and unlike Brief Interviews I didn't throw the book in a trash can. I still have a lot of respect for Rick and every author who publishes multiple books has their one book that falls pretty short. I have yet to read one of Rick's novels, but I bought two of them so when I'm done reading Livability by Jon Raymond (which is turning out to be a fantastic book, so far) I'm going to jump into one of his novels and hope for the best.

So in the end I do recommend Rick Moody. His short stories are mostly spot on, just avoid this book and you'll do just fine.