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Big Brown Bag: Stories

Mark D'Anna
Ex Machina Press, LLC (2007)
ISBN 9780977276356
Reviewed by Mary Durfor for RebeccasReads (6/08)

“Big Brown Bag: Stories” is a collection of twelve short stories, which can only be described as haunting, weird, macabre, and bizarre. Nevertheless, the book is strangely compelling to read. Some of the images created by the author stay with the reader long after the book is closed, and are disturbing to recall, yet difficult to forget. They are reminiscent of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum and The Tell-Tale Heart, haunting images that will stay with the reader forever.

The title story is a strange tale of the journey of two young people, Leila and Eck, who are striving to reach a destination: the home of Peter Twiss. Leila is desperate for work and has pinned all her hopes on the unreachable Mr. Twiss. Eck’s limbs begin to fall off, leaving a bloodbath along the road, and as the big brown bag fills up with his body parts, the destination becomes more and more impossible to reach. The story is exhausting. The next story is The Elephant Factory, where we are subjected to all the mean and disturbing thoughts of the first-person storyteller, yet taken in by the otherworldly spinning, dancing lights that he and his date, Delia, observe while on the roof of the Elephant Factory. Another story, Robotics, follows a husband and wife who are observing their neighbor constructing a robot in his garage, while they await the return of their son, Jack, who was horribly injured in the military, and who will be encased, hooked up to, and inextricably bound with so many machines when he returns home that he, too, will be like a robot. In the story, The Baby Vanishes, a pregnant woman deals with the stress of her third pregnancy by screaming, a technique which she had used in her first two pregnancies with good results. However, this baby chooses to leave them before being born, and they react to the event quite uniquely. By this time, the author has us in a state of mind that simply accepts his stories of the bizarre without question.

This is Mark D’Anna’s first published book. The reading audience cannot be too squeamish, and must allow leaps of faith while reading the collection. The writing is crisp and intimately descriptive, and I found myself immediately drawn into each story, as unique and different as they were. I look forward to reading future publications from Mr. D’Anna. For now, some of his characters are burned into my consciousness.

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