Review: Velocity Press's Rabid Transit No. 5: Long Voyages, Great Lies

        A Brief Aside: Small Beer Press, publishers of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, seems to pop up in one form or another every time I find high quality small press fiction. I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised, they've been around for ten years, delivering a lot of the best fiction being published, small press or otherwise. I knew I was getting into something good, then, when I saw that three of the five contributors were published in LCRW, and the editors cite LCRW as an inspiration.

        An Introduction: We like small press for the same reason that we like webzines. Webzines, for example, can do things that printed stories can't. This is also why books are better than movies. Not that we don't like movies, printed stories, or major publishing houses (at least sometimes). But small press does things that major publishing houses won't. Small Presses experiment and take more chances. They publish stories that are ungenre-able. Often too fantastic for “literature,” but to literary for SF/Fantasy.

        The Chapbook: A six-dollar perfect bound chapbook (plus one-fifty S & H) with six great stories spanning ninety-two pages. It's edited by Christopher Barzak, Alan DeNiro, and Kristin Livdahl. It's also got a boat and a train and a carriage on the cover (see above).

        The Stories: This is the important bit. The deal breaker, as it were. The stories are as follows: “The Mom Walk: A Story in Five Stories” by Alice Kim, “Shackles” by David J. Schwartz, “My Whole World Lies in Waiting” by F. Brett Cox, “Mountain, Man” by Heather Shaw, “The Ghost Line” by Meghan McCarron, and “Release the Bats” by Geoffrey H. Goodwin.

        Because they're short stories and not novels, I believe it does a bit of an injustice to go too much into the plot. Longer works can have their entire premise laid out in black and white without suffering much (there are some exceptions). Short stories, however, while they still may be beautifully presented (as some of the stories in this chapbook are) still seem to rely on giving you a fresh perspective that can be spoiled with too much telling.

        I will say, however, that there's an amazing variety of stories that go all the way from absurdity to subtle profundity. There's SF, Fantasy, and magical realism, all told in the abovementioned literary/genre synthesis.

        Small press fiction often has flaws, and the stories in this collection aren't perfect. More than once, I was pushed just to the line of believability, the line at which I'm not willing to buy the story anymore. There are slightly awkward moments, and the little points where, as a reader, you're thrown out of a story. A bit of wooden dialogue, usually. The bits are few and far between, however.

        Conclusion: While you can pick up a good paperback novel from the bookstore for seven dollars and fifty cents (the price of this chapbook plus shipping), we at Susurrus think that it's pretty vital to the flourishing of literature that you make sure to spend some of your money supporting small press endeavors. A variety of fresh voices and fresh ideas make this a chapbook to savor, put on your bookshelf for a few months, and then read again. I have a feeling that even if it sits on your bookshelf for a couple of years, when you pick it up again, it'll still read like some of the freshest and newest fiction out there.

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