John Edward Lawson

I picked this work up at StokerCon, where it was recommended to me as worthwhile if I wanted to check out more horror poetry. While it came with some trigger warnings, none of those warnings are ones which normally affect me, so I looked forward to digging in. And, well...I finally did.

The truth is, I don't understand why or how this could have been recommended. I've got wide-ranging tastes in poetry, but I couldn't force myself to get through most of the longer poems, and in general, this simply felt incredibly underwhelming. Many of the poems felt like they were still in rough-draft form and weren't publication ready, and so many moments felt as if they'd been built only for shock value, I had a hard time enjoying any of the works here. There were some moments and lines that struck me as powerful, but unfortunately, they only seemed to make it clearer that a lot of the poems weren't living up to their full potential or had been rushed to publication. Or maybe the final result here is the absolute intention, shock value above all, but if that's the case, it's just not for me. I've read some horror poetry I loved, but I'm afraid I can't really find anything here to speak highly of, much as it pains me to say that.… (meer)

It was unsettling to pick up the book and not remember much aside from the fact that there was an anthropological dig at George W. Bush. I read Sick: An Anthology of Illness years ago, a book Lawson edited, and vividly recall it that it was very good – it was one of the first bizarro books I ever read, though at the time I wasn’t aware of bizarro as a genre and lumped mentally in with extreme horror. I think I was expecting to be as enthralled with Discouraging at Best. I wasn’t but that does not mean that Lawson missed the mark. You can’t fall in love with every book. And a flip through it jogged my memory. When a book is utterly unmemorable, a flip doesn’t help. In this case, the flip reminded me how hilarious the story about the Nobel Laureate was. It reminded me how deeply sad the first story in the collection was, though peppered with dark humor. It bothers me that I didn’t remember it clearly, though that does not mean that this is a bad collection. It just means it likely will not be one of my favorite bizarro books. Read my entire review here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/discouraging-at-best-by-john-edward-lawson… (meer)

So this is one of those books where you say, it wasn't at all what I expected but then you can't really remember what you expected. It was strange and the first chapter or so was really surreal and hard to follow but eventually it evened out.

I can't say the story's plot was all that exciting but it was a fairly enjoyable read. I liked the rap parts, they were hilarious and all the pop culture references. The swiming thing was kind of strange. I couldn't tell if it was there because the author was a swimmer or if he thought it would add depth to the character or as a tool to explain how the main character survives multiple action scenes involving water. (but did the action scenes come about because he was a swimmer or did the idea for the swimmer thing come about because of the action scenes - see what I mean?).

I really thought this one might be an extremely post-modern (in a bad way) read, but instead it was fairly straight forward (but very strange).… (meer)

A collection of five stories. It was okay, but not my favorite. Some of the stories, like the first in the book, were very entertaining, while I found myself struggling to just get through other ones. My feelings are very up and down about the collection as a whole. I liked the way that the stories intertwined with one another, and I'm sure that if I had the desire to read them again I could find even more connections between them. The problem is I have no desire to read the book a second time. Maybe I will as time passes.… (meer)