Small press books can accumulate like goiters on a sea hag. You trundle off to a reading, you get jazzed up on coffee and words or cold beers and words, the reader knocked you out, or the reader was extremely attractive and/or exotic, or the reader seemed even more plagued and hated and in need of support than yourself and the next thing you know you're home five or ten bucks lighter and there is a new wafer thin sheaf of papers to add to your pile of "soon-to-be-read" tomes.
"Six Off 66" by David Daniel and published by Baltimore's carny-like Publishing Genius Press is not a book to get lost in the piles. (And I didn't have to pay for it, although my copy was handed over reluctantly after Adam had scanned the rest of the crowd many times after handing out designated prerequisite free copies to Chris Toll, the Lenin of Baltimore verse, Justin Sirois, the ruling young poetry Mandarin and Heather the crafty genre-defying master of all arts.)
Not since reading some of John O'Hara's best stories have I come across some gems like these. They don't waft off the air of "well here are some extra tidbits i have laying around in my desk, publisher without the giant checkbook", they instead are tightly wound tales of otherness. Each one distinct and dealing with a different mileau. There's even a classic war story - "The Man who Dreamed of Death" - that has nothing to do with mutilation or politics, but everything to do with fear of mortality and contextual friendships.
My favorites, though, are the first and last in the collection. The first is "The Thing in the Road" and it deftly describes a non-event filled with true "mystery", the extra something that many people witness and experience in totally different ways.
The last piece, "The Girl At the Aquarium", would make a fine Edward G. Robinson noir if he were still gracing our fouled earth.
The only clunker here, for me, is the title piece. It includes the turgidly done "Wise Indian" character done worse by Oliver Stone in "Natural Born Killers".
This is Publishing Genius' fourth book/publication and it feels good in the hands. My only complaint is that the Press name isn't printed anywhere on the cover. Perhaps it is a sly or humble touch, but for the uninitiated they might mistake it for one of those self-published plums that arrive in plain brown wrappers and tell the true tale of a housewife and her courageous battle with blood sugar.
