Sex Dungeon for Sale!
2009.11.05
Having only recently learned to read, most of the reviews here have been aimed at bad movies. Books take longer to get through, usually, and I don't like to waste my time with boring books about Mary Sues and the paranormal creatures that want to eat/bang them. So, when I decided to review Patrick Wensink's new book, knowing Wensink himself was going to see it, I initially had that looming sense of dread that comes with having to maybe tell someone that their prose sucks, but "it's creative, I guess, so keep trying." Goddamn fortunately, the exact opposite thing happened.
Sex Dungeon for Sale! is a quick read- you can finish it in about the time it takes to sit through Were-Dragon vs. The Teenage Psychic Mummy from Mars 6, or whatever movie SyFy is playing in between episodes of Stargate. Wensink has a natural flow to his writing style that carries like a casual conversation, and it's peppered with what I thought were some excellent uses of metaphor. His stories have a subdued strangeness to them. I never felt like Wensink is trying too hard to be random and weird (what I call "Monkeycheese")- the absurdities of the worlds he constructs parallel the absurdities of our own world. Things seem strange at first, but plausible. Even when writing about debates over "Kill" settings on a dish washer, or breakfast before a suicide bombing, it comes across as oddly casual, rather than a preachy commentary on contemporary mores.
With only 11 short stories, Wensink gives us a taste of his range: "Donor 322" is dark, "Wash, Rinse, Repeat" mirrors portions of our current culture while doubling as a love story with detective elements, and "My Son Thinks He's French" has an irreal aura that reminds me a bit of D. Harlan Wilson's work. Wensink definitely has potential, and I don’t want to name-drop too much, but I got the same feeling from this book that I got from Kevin Donihe's Shall We Gather in the Garden: this is a good first book, and I think he’s only going to improve from here.
"Sex Dungeon for Sale!" is only 10 dollars on Amazon, and if you like the Bizarro genre, throw this one in your cart. If money talks, it needs to tell the guys at Eraserhead Press to hang on to Wensink long enough to find out what he's really capable of.
Favourite Stories:
Donor 322
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Pandemic Jones
Monkeycheese Rating: 1/5 (5 is bad)