Cheap Dreaming in Fields of Killer Sheep: And Other Stories (Book) (David Disalvo) Price

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Customer Reviews of Dreaming in Fields of Killer Sheep: And Other Stories

Holden Caufield grows up and rebels, and other stories
This book of entertaining and provocative short stories, snippets of a kind of life, explore the old existential questions (suggested by the back cover): "forging" a self-identity, "confronting the past," and "living an 'authentic' life." The author, who apparently works in the public relations field, poses the questions one might suspect the author is asking of himself. Indeed, in his title story, one might wonder if the protagonist serves for Mr. Disalvo the role that the internet plays for the protagonist.

The title story, ("Dreaming in Fields of Killer Sheep") is the tale of an advertising executive who watches his highly desirable life implode, horrifically but quite willingly.

The reader might start the story by asking himself, what if Holden Caufield never wandered the streets of Catcher in the Rye's New York in his preteen years? Instead, suppose Caufield grew up and became an advertising executive in Atlanta and only then had his crisis of identity. If so, he might have had a journey similar to that of Stephen Polantil.

Beginning his journey in Atlanta, Stephen Polantil is awakened by an earthquake registering 4.9 on the Richter scale. Not enough to wreak havoc, but enough to alert the reader that Stephen is about to embark upon an unexpected and traumatic quest.

As a high ranking ad executive with higher doubts about the work he is performing and the nature of his relationship to his fiance, Stephen begins an anonymous website he entitles "Sir-Rants-A-Lot" where he pours out what he cannot otherwise express in his professional and personal lives. In the end he is caught, as we knew he would be and as he secretly wanted to be, and Stephen wanders into the mountains to explore his questions about whether a man controls his own destiny, or whether he is the puppet of a self-serving greater being. Although Stephen can only contemplate the first, he confronts the possibility of the second, and concludes with hints at a potential synthesis of the two.

Thus, Stephen manages to manipulate the loss of his job and his fiance as he rebels from a future that appears all but written in stone for him and instead takes an existential journey into the mountains; that thin high strata of atmosphere that few aspire to, let alone attain.

The author is clearly well read, adapting existentialist and pragmatic issues into Stephen's dizzy head, although I'm not sure the two options the author provides for us to ponder represent the full universe of potential explanations of life. The Greek tragedians (Sophocles for instance), Shakespeare, and philosophers from Aristotle to Alasdair MacIntyre address other alternatives; namely the possibility of identity founded within one's roles and duties in a family, a community, a profession. Such an identity is not one chosen by the protagonist, it is foist upon him. Yet, paradoxically, a person may have more freedom in that situation than he would as a lonely atom drifting through space as the existentialists concluded.

In the story, Stephen's father tells Stephen that "a man is the product of his actions, not his words." Stephen argues that a man is the product of both. Stephen finds himself defending his father's position against his own argument later in the story (in a type of self-denial). Yet again, the reader should ask, do we have the full universe of options here? Is a man the product of his actions? his words? both? or something more?

Indeed, as Aeschylus reveals in his "Oresteia," a man is the product not so much of his words and actions, as of a history. And in this story, Stephen may move and act by his own choices, but those choices are made in the context of a line of history that puts Stephen in a certain place at a certain time and makes him a certain kind of man. Haunted by his own all-but-inevitable future, Stephen, like most moderns, pursues freedom but perhaps what Stephen ought to pursue is wisdom. In one sense, Stephen's "mountaintop" experience confronts him with the possibility of wisdom. Yet, Stephen flees even that opportunity.

Unfortunately, the reader will see little exploration of whether there can be fulfillment and freedom enabled by a person understanding their place within a larger, already established framework (as pointed out above: a family, community, profession).

William Faulkner - the author heralded as THE author in this story - once wrote, "The past is not dead. It is not even past." I would have enjoyed seeing the author explore this reality more fully in Stephen Polantil's life.

With that caveat, this is a good first work from an author we will hear from again. The real value of this work may be the contrasts one can draw from this early work to those he will produce as the author and his fiction writing mature.

Scintillating shorts
This scintillating set of unrelated short stories brings us into the lives of a set of well-drawn characters, most (but not all) in the early decades of their careers. These men and women are still searching, with an often haunting clarity, for themselves, and for what life means to them. Many of them face a sudden opportunity to change the course of their life drastically, and their choices reflect not only the unexpected peripheral outcome of such an event, but the frequently mercurial nature of the opportunity itself.

My two favorites among this favorite-rife collection both incorporate a plot twist that brings the reader, shivering with delight and apprehension both, into an unexpected plane. My foremost favorite, "Beneath," follows a hesitant father into the female clothing section seeking a gift for his adolescent daughter. I won't give away the particulars of the stark drama that unfolds, except to say that there is a later conversation between himself and an unrelated adolescent that simply leaps off the page with its unexpected raw emotional honesty, and the startling ways in which such honesty can bring resolution, even if without an actual solution to an immediate problem.

"Godzilla's Revenge," although gruesome in the extreme, is in some ways a much lighter tale, because it is as gripping and (one hopes) unrealistic as the horror flicks of the title and of the narrator's professional bent. In a tale somewhat reminiscent of "Deliverance," two young white-collar city lads step by accident into a grisly adventure in which their unlikely rustic opponents all sport mullets (can we find a more hideous scenario right there?!). The denouement arrives after a breathless series of climaxes, each more intense than the other, including the build-up to a bar-room altercation, the ritual chase into the dark woods, and the separation of our heroes to uncertain ends. It's all great fun and good shivers, all the way through.

A third favorite in this collection is the shortest and the least like any of its fellows. "Catapult" is a brief uncertain voyage through the mind of the most uncertain of untrustworthy narrators - a man who questions his own truths. It's a brilliant bit of flash fiction, and worth the purchase price right there.

I strongly recommend this collection. My only caveat is that if (as was my case) you are forced to intersperse your reading with your quotidian tasks, be prepared to find yourself distracted from your kids' rendition of the play practice, your spouse's shopping list requests, and that dry inter-office correspondence, while your mind seethes with the implications and possibilities of the tale from which you were torn. It's very much that sort of book.