One Day Closer to Death · Eight Stabs at Immortality

With his four acclaimed novels, Bradley Denton has demonstrated himself to be one of the most original and talented fantasists at work today. This new volume reprints seven imaginative visions of death and life, including a look at Lenny Bruce in the afterlife, a tale of what-might-have-been from the life of Mark Twain, and a visit to the "conflagration artist", and and adds a long chapter in the saga of Jimmy Blackburn, "Blackburn Bakes Cookies" .

Amazon.com ReviewBradley Denton, who grew up in Kansas and now proudly calls himself a Texan, is a modern master of oddball fantasy. Comparisons to fellow Texans Joe R. Lansdale and Howard Waldrop (and even, to jump across the Atlantic, to Jonathan Carroll) are perhaps inevitable, but Denton does his own thing. And he never repeats himself, either. If you haven't discovered him yet through such novels as Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Blackburn, or Lunatics, this collection is a great place to start. In a previous printing as a pair of small-press collections, six of these tales won the 1995 World Fantasy Award. Added into the mix are two new stories, including one that serves as a coda to the saga of Jimmy Blackburn (Blackburn).

"All the stories in this book," Denton says, "harassed me into writing them, but some of them literally gave me nightmares until I set them down on paper." One Day Closer to Death: Eight Stabs at Immortality is about living in the face of death--the toll it takes, the jokes we make. Each story is a unique dark gem that can't be summarized by a list of phrases--a self-destructive performance artist, the coyote "Trickster" of legend, black-pajama-wearing demons in a field of sorghum, Lenny Bruce and John Belushi in the afterlife--but those snatches at least hint at the variety of themes. What makes the book, though, is how Denton's earnest tone, as flat as the prairies of his childhood, can deliver deadpan humor in one sentence, and a serious, disturbing question in the next.

You can bet on it: this collection is going to be a classic. --Fiona Webster

From Kirkus ReviewsA debut collection from Denton, the author of several astonishing novels (Lunatics, 1996, etc.), comprises eight substantial if largely unclassifiable tales, seven dating from 198694, plus one original--a sort of sequel to Denton's 1993 novel, Blackburn. In alternate-history mode, Sam Clemens rides with a vicious band of Missouri bushwhackers until, despite his Confederate sympathies, he can no longer endure the brutality, injustice, and futility of it all. There is life after death, or so iconoclastic comedian Lenny Bruce discovers, but it's a grim, humorless existence, designed only to break the spirit and make him conform. And the company that owns a Janis Joplinlike singer re- creates her dead boyfriend in order to kick her back into creativity mood. Another tale reveals how it may be better not to kill your worst enemy. Elsewhere, a supernatural coyote takes revenge upon the hunters that torment his species; a performance artist sets herself aflame before diving off a high tower into a shallow tank of water; and, in the original entry, a Sicko schemes to obtain the ashes of executed serial killer Jimmy Blackburn in order to consume him and gain Blackburn's powers. Unsettling stuff, seemingly designed to provoke outcries (``Ugh!'' would be the least of them) by a probing and determined intelligence; what's missing, mostly, is the idiosyncratic, compulsive chemistry of Denton's novels. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.