I am a white man. I am almost certainly under-employed. I once had success with women, but I have now fallen into loneliness. I often fantasize about sleeping with women I will never approach. If I don't do this, I sleep with prostitutes. In any case, I have women problems. My friends aren't really friends, just other people sharing my immediate space. I have a tendency to use metaphors or analogies which are, to put it mildly, hackneyed. Moon, milk, blood, water, dripping. "The sun... sliced into us like laser beams." You get the point. I am the character in each of these stories.

There is the one protagonist, one sentence length, one tone throughout this entire collection. Each story on its own is pretty good. Lange can write, no doubt about it. But boy does it get tiresome over the length of a book. It's really worth three stars, but Goodreads' scale is so skewed that I could only give it 2. Basically, it's worth a weekend read from the library. I hope his novel is a little more varied than these stories. ( )

The reviews printed in this book compare Richard Lange to Raymond Carver and Denis Lehane, and I think they're right. The stories in this collection call Carver immediately to mind, set as they are in a dark, hardscrabble Southern California. The stories are longer and probe deeper and are what Lehane might write if he wrote about Los Angeles.

The stories are all beautifully written, sad and hopeful all at once. "Bank of America" is the one I thought of long after finishing, but all the stories deal with failure--failed actors, failed providers, dying relationships. Just about nearly perfect. ( )

I was drawn to this book because the publicity and word on the street made comparisons between his stories and Denis Johnson's, Raymond Carver's, and, one of my new favorites, Scott Wolven. I must say the comparisons are apt and I would also throw in Thom Jones for good measure. Blurbs were coming from T.C. Boyle, Alice Sebold, and George Pelecanos and I am now adding my own support to the list. One of the things I like most is when I read a sentence or a paragraph that is unique and poetic and contains just the right amount of insight and emotion so that I can only pause, stare of into space and dream about writing one like it. Richard Lange accomplishes that over and over in this collection of stories. They are petty theft gritty with slightly off center characters trying (and often failing) to get just a little juice from the lemon of life. The stories feature many places you will recognize if you live in Los Angeles, not necessarily by name but by description alone (Tang's Donuts for example). There's despair, there's hope, there's redemption...all the classics. -Steve