James Maddox, Kendra Sims and Scott Gabriel, three of Susurrus Press's assistant editors, check out Jame's Burr's short story collection, Ugly Stories for Beautiful People (2007, Corsega Press). Here's what they had to say about it.

Kendra Sims says:

     Pick up Ugly Stories for Beautiful People like you would a straining garbage bag. In the general refuse of our world, something we've lost has been waiting to be unearthed.

     Warning: if one of the glamorous manages to get tangled in the tight prose, we might stumble away mangled. A callused hand is better fit to click the mouse. Every haphazard genesis, chaotic revelation, or personal apocalypse here showcases the basic elements of the speculative. What if's rush past fast enough to leave reflection blasting your cheek. The heroes are family planning products and abominations against creation alike, as well as the poor slobs who never expected the surreal to bat their lives from paw to paw. The interlinked episodes will prove that the underground of Barcelona and London suburbia have more in common than the coincidences shuttling characters between them. And if you want to take a break from your reading, eye a page you've laughed or spat at for a test of your personality even Rorschach needed. The stories, most with the pedigree of previous publication, are rejects from the happy-ending factory.

     It isn't a book for little sisters, neither those brats with big eyes and fast hands, or the women who might cross themselves at protagonists who happen to be porn stars or substance abusers. And when the pages finish sucking you in so you can raise a stained face, you'll be grateful such beautiful stories exist for such ugly people, the poor saps.

James Maddox says:

When you come to a book, there are certain things you expect from it. In the broad sense, you expect entertainment, enlightenment, maybe in a small degree a sense of disgust, but what you don’t expect is often the thing that either kills you or keeps you enthralled.

I don’t read much horror anymore. Maybe occasionally I’ll pick up a King novel, but that’s about as creepy as I like it to get. Not because I don’t like creepy. No, I enjoy all kinds of creepy, but because the majority of horror writers are so predictable, ridiculous, over-the-top, all of the above. So when I was asked to read James Burr’s collection of short stories, a collection that had been passed around a few horror review sites recently, my first response hinged on what I thought would be regarding a bunch of horror stories:

“Yeah, I don’t think so.”

But the Rev being the Rev did some mumbo jumbo with tofurkey and kimchi, and suddenly I was feeling very compelled to read through a couple of the thirteen tales held within Ugly Stories for Beautiful People.

After the first story, I wanted to put the book away.

“BobandJane” made me want to put a gun to my face for its silliness. For the most part, I knew what Burr was trying to accomplish: Ridiculousness, but the campy way he tried to achieve his goal left me sighing. This was what I was afraid of. This was what had been delivered.

Still, I pushed on to the next story, and there I found “Foetal Attractions.” In this story, we find the protagonist is a home pregnancy test with a great deal of consciousness. Entirely likeable, the test relays all the events that surround it as best it can from both inside then outside its box.

Though the premise may seem awkward, ludicrous even, the writing carries it with such a weight that you buy into the story completely. Great writing, multi-genre slips, involved characters: this, this, was what I was hoping to read, and the glory was to be well-lived in the next story “Blue,” and then especially well in “The Dada Relationship Police,” where a man receives notes saying his relationship is finished, a prediction that only seems to come true because of the DRP’s interference.

Another campy yet slightly entertaining story comes by way of “It,” though I could have done without these kinds of humorous interludes between stories. It seems that I became more drawn to Burr’s fiction when he had his tongue out of his cheek, but, to be fair, I could certainly see how a select group of readers could enjoy that kind of thing.

The rest of the collection does well for itself, interweaving in a few perceptible, in a few thematic, in a few character binding ways, making the overall experience enjoyable and far beyond what your run-of-the-mill short story compilation tends to offer.

So take the great with the not-so-great, my reader chums, and find yourself a copy of Burr’s creation and give it a go. I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

Scott Gabriel says:

     In Ugly Stories for Beautiful People, James Burr brings us on a hallucinogenic tour of the inner sicknesses that love, and lust, can inspire. This collection of thirteen stories has a daunting range, spinning from a chance pub-encounter with an over-sexed sixty-four year-old dame ("Mutton Pie"), to a nation-wide secret society of relationship-despoilers ("The Dada Relationship Police"). 

     Between these extremes in scope, Burr brings to life an almost zoological variety of characters, a sweeping menagerie of insipid drug dens, high art soirees, faltering romances, madness, and the ever-present reggae. Burr convincingly weaves together the various societal strata of London and Barcelona from beggar to bureaucrat, acid-head to activist, and brings them to life to co-exist side by side in the same heartbroken, disillusioned universe.

     The stories swing pendulously between broad tales of the lost and the isolated finding a way through (or into) madness, love, and salvation, and smaller tongue-in-cheek indictments of dating, told in small staccato bursts with an Englishman’s droll sense of humor.

     Despite the extremes, there are also constant ingredients to Burr’s stories: a hefty dose of heart-broken cynicism, a dash of crazy, and an ever-present sprinkling of drugs (for the broader stories), alcohol (for the smaller tales), and sex (throughout the book). For the most part, it’s a good recipe.

     There are exceptions. The artistry of Burr’s more speculative stories is occasionally interrupted by Dr. Kokoschka, a recurring and somewhat adolescent creation of three-piece suit irony sitting in a sex therapists chair. Dr. Kokoschka, suggests to his clients that rather than search for love, they simply engage a prostitute because it “avoids all those messy emotional ties, all that agony when she leaves because the business has gone bump…” He often goes on to speak his own (or Burr’s) subtext: “How can anyone truly believe there’s such a thing as romantic love? It demands the impossible …”

     The stories that Dr. Kokoschka visits are cute enough to be read but lack the subtle grace of Burr’s other narratives. However, despite the unevenness of Burr’s storytelling, there are some gems here. Fortunately for the now-and-future-fans of James Burr, Dr. Kokoschka and his tongue-in-cheek universe seems to have faded in prominence in Burr’s later writing, in fact Burr’s more recent writing is his best.

     Most noteworthy are "Life’s What You Make It" (2002) and "Blue" (2003). In Blue a woman plunges into the gritty, sexy underbelly of Barcelona’s drug and reggae-crazed subculture and comes face to face with some bloody activists who are trying to save the world from its own lack of empathy. In "Life’s What You Make It", Burr takes us into the subjective mind of a sick woman, making the insane comprehensible and the rest of reality a shifty thief.

     Ultimately, Burr’s view alternates between the sentimental bitterness of failed romance and a sweeping image of modern life in all its sickness and beauty. Burr’s writing, like his characters and his world, fluctuates from the simple to the complex, from the vulgar to the sublime. It is as if Burr cannot decide whether he wants to indict society or glamorize it. 

     And because that’s the point, Ugly Stories for Beautiful People is worth a read.

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