Praise for John Dermot Woods:
Electric Literature 25 Best Novels of 2014
"Poignant and unsettling, and much like a good short story collection these tales resonate long after the book is closed."—Largehearted Boy
"An accomplished artist and writer, in addition to being an entertaining and often an electrifying one. John Woods does something very original in his combining of the arts in this collection, and my hat's off to him in his two-hat achievement."—Stephen Dixon
"Like a lost season of The Wire directed by Richard Linklater, The Baltimore Atrocities beguiles, bemuses, often horrifies, and never fails to impress. John Woods renders small moments of intimacy and violence with remarkable compression and eerie calm; together they form a rich disturbing portrait of the city-as-zonked-out-slaughterhouse, its denizens both the butchers and the butchered."—Justin Taylor, author of Flings
The Baltimore Atrocities is a mordant, deadpan collection of more than one hundred murders, betrayals, heartbreaks, suicides, and bureaucratic snafus—each with a half-page illustration by the author—that tells the story of a couple who spends a year in Baltimore in search of their respective siblings, who were abducted decades earlier as young children.
John Dermot Woods is a writer and cartoonist living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of a collection of comics, Activities (Publishing Genius, 2013), and two previous illustrated novels, No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear (with J.A. Tyler) and The Complete Collection of people, places & things. He and Lincoln Michel created the funny comic strip Animals in Midlife Crises for the Rumpus. He is a professor of English at Nassau Community College.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 13, 2014 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781566893794
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781566893794
- File size: 10818 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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August 15, 2014
A work of avant-garde fiction that makes The Wire look like a promotional video from the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce. As the setting of the long-running television series The Wire, the long-suffering city of Baltimore became synonymous the world over with drug dealing, corruption and violent crime. With the publication of this book, Woods (No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear, 2012, etc.) takes it to the next level. A few samples of his narrator's observations: "The city council...by necessity, ranks human slavery very low on the list of the city's woes." "[T]he people of Baltimore were quick to squander a child's life." "My least favorite civic institutions, which, to my knowledge only exist in Baltimore, are dead animal lending libraries...." While these accusations clearly are not serious, they are not all that funny, either. This is a compendium of gruesome flash fiction pieces involving drownings, kidnappings, suicides, betrayals, heartbreaks and heartlessness, most pinned rather quaintly to a specific Baltimore neighborhood-Roland Park, Guilford, Remington, Butcher's Hill. ("To explain why his mother had killed his father, a promising chef in Mount Vernon....") These miniature horror stories, some about associates or relatives of the narrator, others based on rumor or news, are clustered around the chapters of an ongoing narrative about two men trying, in various half-baked and surreal ways, to locate their abducted siblings, each of whom vanished long ago in the same park in Baltimore. Well, no surprise, really: "[C]hildren have been disappearing from this city for years and years." Woods now lives in Brooklyn; Baltimoreans may hope he will turn there for his next inspiration. The book is illustrated with the author's charming ink drawings, which have the feel of New Yorker cartoons...if only one could get the joke.COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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