Fiction
The Appeal of Impropriety
Too Beautiful for You: Tales of Improper Behavior by Ron Liddle (Doubleday $19.95)
These delightfully evil stories will have you snickering, gasping, gagging, shaking your head and laughing. Guaranteed to appall and fascinate, these 11 deliciously distasteful tales will make you want to wipe your hands after putting it down.
Liddle's tribute to "improper behavior" is as fresh a concept for a collection of stories as I've ever heard, but even better, he has the literary talent to exploit it in full. more
Liddle gives us an uncomfortably close view of unpleasantness in many forms, while satirizing everyday hypocrises. Full of visceral images, cutting wit and beatiful language, these stories are surprising on many levels.
In "The Window" a man seeking to fake a suicide attempt gets more than he bargains for when he crosses paths with an irate office worker; "What the Thunder Said" offers a hot and sweaty look at a man having an affair with his mother-in-law, whom he dislikes intensely; in the screamingly funny "The Long, Long Road to Uttoxeter" is maimed in an accident but his lost limb is the last thing on his mind. The thoroughly appalling "Headhunter Gothic" starts with a man picking up a nurse while his wife is giving birth elsewhere in the hospital, and goes downhill from there; "Fucking Radu" offers up a cornucopia of monstrous people who seem all-too familiar; in the unexpectedly hilarious "Ring, Ring, goes the Bell" a high school principal and a homicidal student have a little talk.
Liddle, an associate editor of The Spectator in the UK, has served up a perfectly horrid little collection. And I mean that in the best possible way.
Buy this book!