The first thing I noticed was the vividness of the prose. In the service of these stories Beach deploys striking metaphors and similes, crisp and believable dialogue, and rich and evocative adjectives and verbs. It frankly astounds me that this is his first published fiction.

WIthin the first few pages I was also struck by the formidable range of Beach’s stories. They’re all over the map, both literally, and in terms of tone, setting, even genre and theme.

It’s also impressive how complete many of the stories are. Some not only establish character, setting, mood, but also establish a narrative conflict or even suggest its resolution. A few beg for continuation, to be seen as an excerpt from a longer work — and at least a couple of them are explicitly connected — but most of them don’t. They’re self-contained little nuggets. One of them is almost like a distillation of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle into, well, 420 characters.

I’m tempted to include a handful here, but I wouldn’t know where to start or stop. I almost want to retype the whole book, which would clearly exceed the boundary of fair use. And there’s a generous sampling at 420characters.com; if it’s not quite the set I would have curated, I think it’s fairly representative.

Lest I seem too gushy — I do think it’s far easier to make a great string of 420 characters than to make great strings of 420 characters that tie into a cohesive whole the size of a book, or even the size of a more typical short story. Last paragraphs are much harder to write than first paragraphs, and most of these stories are more like beginnings than like endings. Beach hasn’t proven to me that he can sustain the level of creativity he displays here throughout a work that’s judged by more conventional standards, less dependent on elision. But I really, really, want to see him try.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

The Woodrow Wilson Dime is an expansion/re-working of the short story “The Coin Collector” (featured in I Love Galesburg in the Springtime). I think it’s much weaker than the original; Finney adds a Walter Mitty-ish dimension by describing some of his protagonist’s daydreams as if they were factual; this seems like an iffy gambit in a story in which fantastic things “really” happen, and didn’t exactly help maintain my suspension of disbelief. Finney seems to be aiming for the mood of a vintage madcap flick, but I think some comedy tactics work much better with a visual medium. If, for instance, a film requires that a character not realize that what seems to be a dog is a human in a dog costume, the movie invites both the audience and the cast in on the joke. We can see that the person doesn’t really look like a dog, so the fourth wall is broken; we know the actor being duped isn’t really dumb enough to mistake a human for a dog (even if the character is). The humor arises in part from the literally incredible nature of the situation. In a novel this sort of thing is much harder to pull off, and The Woodrow Wilson Dime strained my incredulity muscles. It was also originally published in 1968, but this 1987 edition appears to have been revised very slightly, with mentions of things like Ronald Reagan’s political career that felt jarring and anachronistic to me.

Marion’s Wall is also in part an homage to classic film: in it a couple living in San Francisco are haunted by the ghost of an unsung silent film actress who died at the outset of her career. (It has a hefty dose of the nostalgia/distate for modernity that characterizes so much of Finney’s fiction.) Al though the ending struck me as weak and predictable, I thought it was pretty darn creepy. It wasn’t clear to me if it was supposed to read quite as creepily as it did for me, and I found that disturbing. (I’m trying to skirt spoilers here, but there are some scenes of dubious consensuality and eerie passivity.)

The Night People made the strongest impression on me both times around. It’s devoid of any fantastic elements, but uses as a key thematic element the eerie sense of otherworldliness one can experience in a deserted place that’s usually crowded, like, say, a commuter thoroughfare in the dead of night. (It shares this, although not plot details or characters, with the short story “The Intrepid Aeronaut,” which also appeared in I Love Galesburg in the Springtime.)

The male protagonists of all three novels struggle in various ways with the strictures of monogamy, but in The Night People “monogamy” is most explicitly presented as an instance of “monotony,” the real foe of the two couples who start wandering around in the dead of night indulging in increasingly anti-social and risky behavior. I thought the first few chapters were terrific; Finney has a knack for very specific physical detail which both captures the strange mood of the nightscape and makes it believable. I didn’t think the rest of the novel quite lived up to the opening, and again I found it hard to suspend disbelief a few times. But I liked it pretty well overall.

needs more demons? a lil bit

But there’s nothing fannish about 7,000 Clams. Ruth is portrayed as a man ruled by his appetites — for food, women, and amusement. He’s a bit of a stinker, frankly, even if he’s not totally charmless. His massive presence — literally and figuratively — forms the gravitational core around which the other characters orbit.

Irby is a history professor, and 7,000 Clams is spiced with enough historical detail that one can learn a bit from the book, but not nearly enough to detract from its substantial entertainment value. Irby skillfully blends a handful of historical figures with invented characters. His people are vivid and multi-dimensional, particularly the brutish yet lovable thug/grifter Frank Hearn, and the two strikingly different dames he gets entangled with in his pursuit of the titular 7,000 Clams. Irby also concocts a remarkably unpleasant but chillingly believable bogeyman (as well as giving a cameo to a real-life nasty). The dialogue is filled with the requisite snaps and wisecracks, and Irby’s descriptions are clear and vivid. The handful of awkward sentences are certainly forgivable in a debut novel.

My one gripe is that Irby’s plot leans awfully hard on coincidence. His St. Petersburg seems like such a small place that there would be no way for people with connections to avoid running into one another. But if the twists strained my credibility, they didn’t much reduce my enjoyment. There’s a sequel, The Up and Up, and I’m eager to read that, too.

needs more demons? nope