By Wade Alan Steele Copyright © 2011 Createspace ISBN: 978-1456569389 209 pages Story collections, like CDs, often share a theme or tone related to the title. In that sense, the title of Wade Alan Steele’s collection, A Sudden Dominance of Shadows, correlates to the opaqueness of many of its stories that delve into the murky psyches of its protagonists, with mixed success. The first two stories, Farewell and Avalon and Beneath, are conventionally literary and fully developed, with an eerie atmosphere that make them compelling and engaging. Sexual undertones add to the creepiness in an unsettling but positive way. Both finish well and contain dialogue that’s nicely balanced with the narrative. Also, they exhibit one thing that’s so often lacking in stories: characters engaged in concrete actions that contribute to the plot. Unfortunately, these traits do not carry through to many of the other stories, which are often too self-consciously literary. The influences of Carver, Kafka, and Woolf ring through, but not always to good effect. Taking the Sandwich, a story about a business person eating a sandwich meant for the homeless, echoes Maupassant’s wonderful Boule de Suif, but lacks that story’s subtle pathos and humanity. Not to mention a lead character to care about, which is a clear distinction between the weaker stories and the stronger ones. We’re Delicious, a story about a chef reality show, turns on a grisly but erotic twist, enticing the reader. But then it spoils it by putting the protagonist in the background in favour of a too-on-the-nose effect. In Uprisings, our concern for the main character seems wasted when we discover the object of her concern so despicable we lose respect for her. There is redemption with the last story, an odd piece of self-absorbed obsession called The Bird Spoke. It wasn’t my cup of tea yet I could still appreciate the writing. It was the most evolved piece in the collection and the best example of the sophistication the author is capable of. It was the cleanest too, in terms of proofreading. I’m not sure if the lack of commas throughout The stories was an intentional style choice but it often made for cumbersome reading. I would argue that in some cases the lack of a comma was indeed a grammatical mistake. I might not have singled this out if not for the presence of other mistakes and inconsistencies in the text. Misaligned indentation, misplaced apostrophes and quotation marks, missing words—all easily fixable with more thorough proofreading—did detract from the reading experience for me. That's why I had to write my essay about this stories to warn you about their quality. The disparate styles of the stories in A Sudden Dominance of Shadows makes the book like a CD collection of B-Sides. The imagination and creative ability of the author is evident but many pieces are either too direct and literal or too obscurely inaccessible. The balance achieved in the first two stories and the last would have improved the others.
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