Gristle: Weird Tales

by Jordan A. Rothacker

Gristle is alchemical theatre, a collection of weird tales, twelve fingers on the steering wheel, with D.H.Lawrence and Sylvia Plath asleep across the back seat, Chekov shivering on the hard shoulder…Gristle is a post-beat riddle, a comedy, a nightmare…Gristle is Salinger descending from his eyrie with a bottle of Thunderbird. Jordan A. Rothacker hasstolen a dream car…The road doubles back upon itself, but the riders are still lost. Sincerity and foolishness glow from the map. Follow, follow, the Moon is over the blacktop and the canny ghosts and story serpents are coming out…

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

134 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2019

About the author

Jordan A. Rothacker is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in Athens, Georgia where he earned a Masters in Religion and a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. Rothacker majored in Philosophy at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York and his life has been split between Georgia and New York (where he was born); he dreams of going west. His journalism has appeared in periodicals as diverse as Vegetarian Times and International Wristwatch, while his fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays can be found in such illustrious venues as Red River Review, Dark Matter, Dead Flowers, Stone Highway Review, May Day, As It Ought to Be, The Exquisite Corpse, The Believer, Entropy, Brooklyn Rail, Vol 1 Brooklyn, Literary Hub, and Guernica. For book length work check out Rothacker's novella (micro-epic) The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015); his novels, And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds Publishing, 2016) and My Shadow Book by Maawaam (Spaceboy Books, 2017); and his short story collection, Gristle: weird tales (Stalking Horse Press, 2019). Get ready for the November 17th, 2020 release of his novel, The Death of the Cyborg Oracle (Spaceboy Books).
www.jordanrothacker.com

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of strange and somewhat forgettable stories. Of the bunch, Parables Three which is three stories within the story, one of a young boy who listens to an old man's story, one of a magician who fears he's a fraud, and one of a little girl who asks god for a christmas present; A Night, Like Any Other; Or Ooh, Ooh That Smell where a bullied boy finds release in burning a body, and Winter Solstice, in which a young man buries the star of his deceased mother's nativity scene, were immediate favorites. That is not to say that the rest of the stories were clunkers... far from it. Each one was uniquely skewed and twisted, but they lacked staying power, quickly fading away the further I navigated into the collection.

[Andrew Skelton · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The body of the town has decayed with the weight of such time and tempest that no real discerning marks remain.”

[Pam Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jordan A. Rothacker’s Gristle reads like episodes of The Twilight Zone if written by Krzysztof Kieslowski. There are moments that we think of as ordinary, detailing loneliness, intellectual frustration, unrequited love. But there is a spark of something in them, whether you want to call it divinity or magic, that brings a notion to the human condition, that these moments are not to be let to pass without knowing their weight. They are quiet, but not ordinary.

[Call Me [Brackets]]

Gristle: Weird Tales, by Jordan A. Rothacker, delivers exactly what it promises—Rothacker provides his readers with a collection of short stories that explores the strange, sinewy bits of life. His stories, often strange and experimental, seek to examine the intricacies of life and living, frequently perplexing and unnerving the reader. While using expert prose, Rothacker’s stories delve into the complexities of God and religion, sex and relationships, pride and shame, and art and life.

Rothacker tackles these huge ideas, which might intimidate many authors, with gusto, using scenes and characters that are at times familiar, as he does in “Augustus and Anastasia” when Augustus meets the “perfect” girl, but is subsequently devastated later in the story when he learns that she already has a boyfriend; other times, Rothacker uses his stories to explore the foreign, as he does in “Parable Fourth,” where a wannabe artist stands isolated in a ghost town and reminisces on his father and the baby he has erased from the world in the name of art.

You can read the rest of our review on our website here:
https://callmebrackets.net/gristle-we...