Manhattan Adult Entertainment: Quirky characters in a surreal America
Wells Tower is a serious wiseacre, the kind who gets away with it not because of his cleverness, but because he cuts to hard truths. Written with startlingly original voice, careening imagination and an abiding fondness for what Teabaggers would call “the non-elites,” his stories are set in a surreal America we know, but aren’t sure we want to.
Tower’s first book, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” attracted much more critical attention than short-story collections usually receive, making many “best of 2009″ lists. His characters include hapless divorcĂ©es, alienated adolescents, child predators of both the obvious and surreptitious varieties, and a Viking who enjoys cleaving skulls as much as the next pillager, but would just as soon be home in the rack with his common-law.
His descriptions are precise, often raw: a baby pigeon mauled by a cat looks “like a half-cooked eraser with dreams of someday becoming a prostitute.” A man who has fallen asleep on a package of saltines now feels the largest cracker shard “lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot there.”