Review of Douglas Lain’s Collection “Last Week’s Apocalypse”

Douglas Lain started publishing regularly right around the time I started reviewing for Tangent, and I remember his stories clicking with me right out of the gates. His first collection, Last Week’s Apocalypse (2006)–is that a great title, or what?–is probably not for everyone’s tastes, but I found it a pretty remarkable book, its stories consistently funny, unsettling, inventive, and full of surprises. I’m not sure I always got the stories, but it never seemed to matter, and ultimately I wasn’t always convinced they were supposed to be gotten–they evoke and provoke, regardless. The prose is effortlessly read, often laugh-at-loud funny, with a singularly quirky tone. Even when the trees obscured the forest, I found myself simply enjoying the trees–its recurring themes and ideas, which include frequent musings on war, drug use, the nature of reality, mental illness, pop culture, marketing, politics, and consumerism, to name a few.
[I was delighted to find a review of my collection "Last Week's Apocalypse" that was written three years after publication, so much so that I'm posting a link to it here.-Doug]

This sudsy update was written on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Diet Soap Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.