Tyrannia

August 26, 2013
DeNiro (Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead) has crafted the rare work whose setting is the realm of pure imagination. “The Flowering Ape” takes us to the furthest reaches of “wherespace,” the stage for an emotionally poignant coming-of-age story of a young intersexed telepath. “Walking Stick Fires” returns to terrestrial for a tale of two buddies riding motorcycles across mean desert roads, two friends who happen to be two multi-eyed, and clawed alien friends who refuel their bikes at gas stations manned by the chained human slaves of a colonized Earth. Across these 11 stories and two prose poems, sprinkled with unrepentant weirdness, DeNiro creates emotionally compact tales suffused with humanity—even when the characters are not human. The stories are at their best when they fully embrace and inhabit their altered worlds. “(*_*?) ~~~~ (-_-): The Warp and the Woof” is the standout in the collection, dedicated to the relationship between a writer and his agent in a dystopian publishing future, which seems fully felt and positively plausible. In contrast, “A Rendition”—a story occurring in the present that details three college students’ attempt at kidnaping a professor who helped draft the torture memos used in the War on Terror—feels heavy-handed and out of place. It’s worthwhile to accompany DeNiro as he follows the unmarked paths of his stories wherever they lead.

October 1, 2013
Quirky, unconventional and outlandish short fiction, bordering on the surreal--and sometimes crossing the border. The first two stories in the collection--"Tyrannia" and "A Rendition"--form a creepy introduction to DeNiro's work. In the former, a political prisoner pays dearly for his "crimes" against the state, and his mutilated body becomes a nesting ground for birds and beetles. In the latter, a trio of inept kidnappers takes hostage a law professor whose political ideas counter their own (although Patrick, the "mastermind" behind the plot, isn't "afraid of getting caught. Instead, the plan for him [is] a form of self-discovery"). Predictably, things go dreadfully and disturbingly wrong. The bizarrely titled "(*_*?) ~~~~ (-_-): The Warp and the Woof" introduces us to a novelist named Roger who finds an old notebook in which, 20 years previously, he had written his first novel. Since then, Roger has had some success as a hack popular writer, but he sends this notebook to his less-than-enthusiastic agent, who sends the compressed files to consultant Amar's wristwatch. And from there, the action gets even more bizarre, from the agent's death to Amar's having sex with his wife. "The Philip Sidney Game," the final story in the collection, is actually a "meta-story," with a narrator named Alan DeNiro finding the manuscript of a story written 12 years before. He then receives a mysterious package with some old computer disks containing three different endings to his story. While DeNiro's approach to fiction can be clever, it more often comes across as simply mildly amusing and self-indulgent.

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October 15, 2013
With just one novel and one story collection under his belt, DeNiro has already garnered a reputation as a genre-bending experimental author with an indescribably quirky but captivating prose style. His latest compilation of offbeat tales and novelettes extends his range even further, including pieces that are either comically surreal or superficially conventional with eccentric little twists calculated to throw readers off guard. Rendition, for instance, begins as a straightforward narrative of college students kidnapping a professor whose most famous treatise justifies torture, then slides into moral ambiguity. Taking place in a drastically altered American landscape 25 years hence, Highly Responsive to Prayers features fundamentalist Christians who indoctrinate worshippers in supersize shopping malls. The title story describes the fate of an executed political dissident's corpse as beetles and birds nest in its decaying organs and skeleton. While fans of avant-garde literature will consider DeNiro's anthology a must-read, fans of speculative fiction who don't mind a few contortionist tricks thrown into their favorite genre might also want to take a peek.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)