Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

by Christian A. Dumais (2014, ISBN: 978-1500538354; available at Amazon.com) I have known the man behind the Drunk Hulk Twitter phenomenon, Christian Dumais, since 2003, when the art and literary website he co-ran, Legion Studios, first began the monthly publication of the strange rants and politico-religious poke-prods of my own alter-ego, Planner Forthright. I reviewed a collection of euphictional anthology, Cover Stories , that he co-edited, and have followed his journey to Poland and into marriage and parenthood and into stand-up humor and his continuing productivity as a writer (ironically, through another social media mechanism, Facebook). I have to admit—although I knew of the Drunk Hulk Twitter account, and followed it—I am Luddite at heart who won’t use a Smart Phone and rarely uses Twitter, doesn’t see its purpose, and follows and is followed in the mid-100s. Nevertheless, the Drunk Hulk phenomenon of the last 5 years (191,000 followers as of this writing) has bee...

A couple of quick bits of business, and we’re off. 1. Euphiction is a new genre wherein authors create “literary covers” of songs. Although many writers have probably been doing this very thing for years, it is formalized by name in this anthology for the first time. 2. I edited the stories by N. Pendleton that appear in this collection. I can take no credit for the success of the stories, or the immense talent of their author. I merely cleaned up the edges… he did all the work. This excellent collection¬—“100 stories, 10 authors, 1 new genre” (plus an intro by Mike Dawson and an Afterword by Sean P. Murray¬) hints at the future of the short story. Longer, but just as visually rich, as flash fiction, these euphicational stories seek to reproduce the compressed narrative structure of the songs on which they were based. They read quickly and make a wide arc from ‘80s genre homage and fun-poking to deep, dark, and seedy. Most of the authors offer a microcosm of the larger variety, ...