On the Night Plain

A KISS cover-band leader pondering a fertility-driven criminal act, a boy watching his hair-metal dad search for love on reality TV, a quiet teenage metalhead stumbling into her own voice while trailing her former roadie father—these are the characters seeking resolution, tempering expectations, and occasionally finding grace and the dignity and strength to go on. Dave Housley's collection examines the quiet desperation and occasional triumphs of growing up and growing older through the prism of music.

Publishers Weekly: 10/27/2014

Accents of hair metal, glam rock, and boy-band pop punctuate the 12 engaging stories in this collection, most of them set in rural backwater towns in the author’s native Pennsylvania. In “Rock Out, Mate,” a teenager being groomed for a lip-syncing boy band asks “What Would Elvis Do?”—and the same question for six other rock star idols—as he attempts to meet the challenges of his job by emulating career choices that his heroes made. “Free Will” applies the rhetoric of Geddy Lee’s lyrics for the Rush song of the same name to the performance of a second-string high basketball team as they desperately strive to win the last game of the season. “Paul Stanley Summarizes the Tragedies of William Shakespeare During Between-Song Banter from the 1977–78 Kiss Alive II Tour,” the book’s funniest story, offers six vignettes in which the KISS frontman attempts to stoke emotions by regaling the audience with references to Shakespeare’s dramas. Housley (Commercial Fiction) populates his stories with adult losers trapped in dead-end lives and teenagers struggling to escape a similar fate, but he treats the pathos of their predicaments gently and with humor, as in “So Fucking Metal,” which follows the antics of two generations of metalheads—an aging former roadie and his teenage daughter—at a memorial concert for deceased Black Sabbath vocalist Ronnie James Dio. Readers will find these stories light, amusing, and warmly wrapped (as Housely writes in “How to Listen to Your Old Hair Metal Tapes,” one of three essays that conclude the book) in “that gauze of nostalgia, the soft edge that comes from growing up with something.”

Praise for If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home:

"It's tempting to only applaud the alchemy of Dave Housley's third collection of stories, If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home, as on every page he transforms the humblest of materials—kid pop, reality TV, mix tapes, boy bands—into what Seinfeld's Kenny Bania would insist is 'gold, Jerry, gold!' Yet there’s also the magical way his sentences, like the metal gods referenced throughout, speed things up, talk to the crowd, slow the pace to ballad-speed, then get the crowd out of their seats. Best of all, in this painfully funny book of yearning and loss, through characters as real as your reflection and plots with the chain reaction cause and effect of a freeway pileup, Housley utilizes pop culture in the way we all do in our most hidden of hearts: as source of sincere solace, cause of overwhelming ache and, most importantly, reason to believe."

— Tom Williams, Author of The Mimic’s Own Voice , Don’t Start Me Talkin’ and Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales

"No one so expertly blends the ability to both skewer and love pop culture in American literature right now as brilliantly as Housley. He's a fucking a national treasure. His stories also obsess about mortality, rightly so, because who wants to die? And I laughed out loud reading this collection, even when his pathetic, dear characters face ridiculous tragedies. Move over David Sedaris and George Saunders, it's time to make room for Dave Housley."

— Paula Bomer , Author of Inside Madeleine , Nine Months , and Baby and Other Stories

"The stories in Dave Housley’s fantastic collection If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home are like Ramones songs: urgent, brazen, and deceptively well-crafted, sizzling with one hooky line after the next. As the Ramones did with, say, 'The Return of Jackie and Judy,' Housley has written rocking stories about rock and roll, about the misfits who stand on the stage and the punks and runts who lurk on the fringes. This book is a testament to Housley’s eye for pop culture and ear for the rock vernacular, and it moves with blistering speed. In the white space between stories, I could almost hear Dee Dee Ramone shouting 1-2-3-4!"

— Joe Oestreich , author of Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll , Bassist and Vocalist in the rock band Watershed

If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home is Dave Housley 's third book of short fiction. He is the author of Commercial Fiction (Outpost 19) and Ryan Seacrest is Famous (Impetus Press, Dzanc Books eBook Reprint). His work has appeared in Hobart, Mid-American Review, Quarterly West, Wigleaf and some other places. He is one of the founding editors of Barrelhouse magazine, and a co-founder of the Conversations and Connections writer’s conference.