In about a decade, when David Pahn is something like a legend around these parts, you’ll treasure this collector’s item puke-pink chapbook, hold it in a special pouch near your crotch, pull the sweaty greasy words out of that secret pocket at inappropriate moments and laugh out loud at just about everything. The thing is, Pahn’s stories are inappropriate. They’re not the kind of work I would term crazy, they don’t experiment with language or anything but they do have a way of twisting around on you, like a first date that’s getting just a bit too touchy. Pahn’s character’s are simple derivations of himself, angry nihilists in search of something they will never mind. Maybe that’s why in at least two of these stories suicide becomes the trope, almost a character in its own right, something that looms in the face of the reader like the barrell of a shot-gun. If Pahn were to kill himself, the value of your sweaty first edition ugly pink chapbook (with multiple pics of the author) would shoot through the roof. But Pahn won’t kill himself. In that same discomfiting way that this stories get too close to you and start talking about moving in together with their dry drab language, they also affirm that these stories are about life, not death.
lit chapbook / publisher: Black Pawn Fiction / main creator: David Pahn / free (with postage)