Intriguing Little Stories
About Odd Little Secrets
"Frank Frost knows how to tell a complex melodrama with intelligence
and panache, and therefore gives pleasure." --Herbert Gold
What's refreshingly entertaining about the stories in Subversives, a new collection of short stories by Frank Frost, is that things--big things--happen to people. The stories are populated by genuine people, good and bad, plain and flamboyant. These people take chances, and then plot takes over and carries them along for a ride full of irony, danger, and surprise. The stories display the domino effect of consequential fiction: a man decides to steal an olive tree, and one complication and injury leads to another until the unwritten denouement.
There's black humor in this book--macabre stories that resemble our worst nightmares gone haywire, like making an illegal turn on the autostrada and ending up in a storm of red tape. Or like a few discarded pennies that escalate into a supermarket shootout. Or like ordering a martini in a restaurant and, before the evening is over, having to pay the consequences by getting paddled and probed by a masochistic bombshell.
Some of the stories end happily. In one, a hen-pecked senior citizen buys a share in a small-town western whorehouse and finds pleasure getting back into business--and vice versa. A nerdy hack writer turns out trash for girlie and biker magazines and ends up riding the waves of magazine mergers until he's living in a mansion. A busload of schoolchildren are taken to the wrong petting farm and get real-life lessons in what makes up life--blood and guts, copulation and feces--and they love it.
Some of the stories are surreal, like "Twilight Zone" stories: a professor leaves his office and finds himself escorted into the afterlife until he fixes a glitch in the computer of the powers that be, and returns to life where he belongs. Others are closer to the earth, like the story of the bigoted domineering father who runs his tractor off a cliff and thereby frees his family to get on with their lives. But it can be said of all of the stories that ordinary people make extraordinary choices and find themselves on an irreversible course that will change them forever.
Frank Frost is professor emeritus of ancient Greek history and archeology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His survey of Greek history, Greek Society, is a top seller in its field. He is also a cook, a jazz pianist, a sailor, a former rugby player, a wine-and-food columnist, and the author of Dead Philadelphians, a novel that the Los Angeles Times called "wonderfully taut, flexible prose: fast-moving, not a word wasted, always conscious of rhythm, powerfully evocative. Take this one to the beach; you won't regret it." |
