The Hanging Gardens of Split Rock
Mike Faloon
Gorsky Press
at Amazon

File under: Fiction, Short Stories, Lunch Meat Sculpture

Many of you are not strangers to Mike Faloon and might know him from Go Metric!. This is his first book of short stories. I have often times talked about my love of the short story writer that writes the small stories of life and not the bigger than life stories. Mike Faloon is one of those writers who tells the small stories.

Whether it is the uber-fan trying to tell us the difference between progressive rock and arena rock ("Half Armadillo, Half Sherman Tank") or the misfits at boy scout camp who struggle with telling on the bully who brought a gun ("The Revenge of Crothamel's Mules") or the college guy trying to figure out if he was on a date with a girl or she just wants to be his friend ("Gumballs or Gravestones") Faloon masters at telling these small stories.

When you are reading these very short stories of five pages or so you get a feeling that they are told from an auto-biographical perspective. A writer shouldn't be able to create as clear a situation and character in so few pages unless he is talking about himself. Yet clearly the characters can not all be autobiographical, the clarity of the stories in so few pages is a testament to the talent that Mike Faloon possesses as a writer.