New Bad News

May 1, 2020
A collage of surrealistic short fictions that range from playful one-liners to Bukowski-tinged ruminations on life and death. Ridge offers a new collection of stories, reminiscences, fragments, and fables that are firmly in his wheelhouse of finding whimsical humor in the everyday world. It opens with a series of interconnected stories that mostly follow the musings of a jaded, heavy-drinking refugee from Kentucky as he bombs around Los Angeles on his motorcycle. Ridge also occasionally touches upon unusual real-life characters, penning a somber tribute to the late musician Elliot Smith and a melancholy portrait of an aged Babe Ruth, among others. The clever duet of "Noir" and "The Second Detective" offers a minimystery, about a private eye looking for a missing girl, replete with the genre's tropes. Most of the stories are extremely short and meticulously minimalist, but Ridge devotes more real estate to the longest story, "Hey, It's America!" involving one man's determination to throw a quirky festival starring Clint Eastwood. Next, we get a big batch of abrupt but ambitiously experimental stories. "Three Prayers for Artists" offers eccentric good wishes for Subway sandwich artists, con artists, and conceptual artists. Most seem like flash fiction, staccato bursts of scenes such as "On Acid," which reads in its entirety, "I glance at our guru's finger as he's pointing at the moon, but then I realize it's his middle finger pointed at a riot cop and it's the middle of the afternoon." The penultimate set of stories starting with "22nd-Century Man" purports to turn some chatbots loose to answer the questions posed in Padgett Powell's novel in questions, The Interrogative Mood (2009). Finally, Ridge finishes with an acid series of stories that follow around Death as the Grim Reaper grapples with anxiety, work stress, and human resources during a well-earned vacay in LA. A collection of unpredictable postmodern jests with more than a little pathos underneath the levity.

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May 15, 2020
It is almost de rigueur to state we live in interesting times. With this peculiar collection, Ridge gives the old adage a jump-start. Calling out William S. Burroughs' cut-up method and tonally reminiscent of Ken Nordine's "word jazz," these vignettes carry the reader through a haphazard fest of fests in hipster-laden Los Angeles, a cross-country ride on a Triumph headed for Kentucky, a noir-influenced search for a lost camgirl, and an experiment in which a bot answers a book of questions. Some forays Ridge takes are more successful than others. When the playfulness of toying with old clich�s is taken down a notch, he expresses a distinctly American voice reaching out of myriad pop-culture remnants. There's a character passing under police tape to go to Church, the local bar, to pray for work; a coyote in an urban landscape lapping up beer; Death's inner dialogue while traveling through California. Ridge creates a gallery of enigmatic oddities that will enchant readers of poetry and experimental literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)