My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories

by Steve Almond

Overview

Steve Almond’s collection My Life in Heavy Metal presents twelve passion-fueled stories (including his Pushcart Prize-winning story “The Pass”) that take a clear-eyed view of relationships between young men and women who have come of age in an era without innocence. These are powerful and resonant stories of love and lust, that bring to life a generation desperately searching for connection in a fragmented world.

In the title story, an El Paso newspaper clerk assigned to review the heavy metal bands playing local arenas is drawn in by the primal music, fueling a torrid affair with a Mexican-American woman that will change him forever. In “Geek Player, Love Slayer,” a thirty-three-year-old woman harbors a secret crush on the young computer repairman in her office–until her ardor is unleashed at an after-work party, with unexpected consequences. In “Valentino,” two teenagers spending their last summer together before heading off to college experience a sexual awakening inspired by the romantic legend of a movie star from long ago.

By turn tender and raw, visceral and other-worldly, the stories of My Life in Heavy Metal capture the moments when the fires of passion burn over and subside into embers of pain and longing. It is a dazzling debut by a vibrant new writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802140135
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/11/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

This collection of 12 short stories is populated by some interesting characters in problematic situations and some not-so-interesting ones in situations familiar enough to be trite. The title story is an example of the latter, with its lackluster pop music critic caught in bed with a new conquest by his college lover. More successful is "Among the Ik," in which aging Professor Rodgers, uneasy with his adult children, recalls a bizarre experience from his early life in academia. Telling about it tests his coming to terms with widowhood; even a second reading of this poignant story is rewarding. "Geek Player, Love Slayer" is an update on the old-fashioned office romance and features a female reporter with a raunchy vocabulary that belies her 33 years. She engages in "lurid banter with Computer Boy" Lance, who can talk to machines. "How to Love a Republican" is thoroughly entertaining, with a James Carvill wannabe meeting his young Mary Matalin when they are in New Hampshire doing "issue work." The aftermath of the election dooms the romance, but the story is a humorous success. The narrator of "The Body in Extremis" is a 34-year-old composition teacher (Almond teaches creative writing at Boston College and Emerson College), who has an "essential problem": "Sexual ideation dominated my thoughts," he declares. This final story casts a narcissistic shadow over the preceding fiction, but there's enough intelligence, angst and humor woven through the collection to please the young audience at which it is aimed. Agent, Amy Williams of ICM. (Apr.) Forecast: This collection has a high entertainment quotient, as signaled by the title, previous publication of some of the stories in Playboy and Zoetrope, and Almond's smooth-flowing prose. Expect a few extra browser hits. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Fourteen delightful debut stories more often than not about man's powerlessness in the face of feminine beauty. "What we want is the glib aria of disastrous love, which is, finally, the purest expression of self-contempt," Almond tells us, though the range of love taken up here suggests that another part of him knows better. In the title story, a young man who covers heavy metal bands for a local newspaper learns of humanity's necessary failures when he discovers his own propensity for betrayal. "Among the Ik" is a touching tale of an academic's grief and impending mortality told through the retold story of his having once been called upon to identify the body of a student. "The Last Single Days of Don Viktor Potapenko" features a lewd but oddly wise barfly in pre-casino Atlantic City who passes his weird wisdom onto our slumming teenaged narrator; and in "Geek Player, Love Slayer," a woman's fascination with a dimwitted officemate becomes a modern anti-love story and a catalogue of all the MTV turns of phrase most would find artless. A boy in "Valentino" fails to come of age but succeeds in learning something of small-town romance, while "The Pass" is an anthropologically toned multicharacter treatment of the traditional sloppy initiation of affection, and "How to Love a Republican" is a love story set during the Bush-Gore election debacle. Almond is at his best when emotion moves his plots and not the other way around, but even his misses are better than most first-time authors' hits. There may be occasional repetitiveness to overcome, and the kinds of sex here may repel some, but more important is Almond's realization that in all love stories "There is a point you reach, I mean, whenyou are just something bad that happened to someone else." Love, or at least sex, everywhere in dirty brilliances that are set amid merely lewd victories.

Kirkus Reviews