People Making Danger: Saturday Matinees
Feature-Length Short Stories
Comedy is derived from badly dealt hands in the dramatic short story collection People Making Danger.
An assisted suicide, an alien visiting a football game, and other realistic magic tricks fill Adam Fike’s farcical short story collection People Making Danger.
In “The Quiet Ones,” a serial killer sacrifices himself and several neighbors in pursuit of the perfect lawn. Citizens of a remote town fight their extinction with the help of aliens in “Operation Dragonhead.” A bank in a desert town, full of mob money, is robbed in “High Desert.” In “Paganini,” Paganini’s son proves that his father isn’t the devil. An older version of a criminal saves his younger self in “Yardley County.” Bonus stories feature a friendly pickup game and a haunted motel.
Just as the stories, taken together, have a unified message, the threads within each story coalesce in their climactic endings. A power-hungry sheriff colludes with the Mafia while his daughter performs petty crimes; abused boys try to escape bullies who are pawns in a larger scheme. Elsewhere, enterprising workers pull together to ward off short-sighted invaders. Suspense is created through paragraph-long scenes of conversations, introductions, and descriptions that shift back and forth in time, building interest in how the seemingly disparate elements connect.
While some characters only live up to their stock names (Lady Grifter or Con Man), named characters become heroic. A theme running through the stories is pushback against powers beyond people’s control, like technological advances and elimination of places. With the exception of “Paganini,” the five “feature length” and two shorter bonus stories take place around California, a land of make-believe and unfulfilled dreams. These are stories of left-behind underdogs and those at the margins of society. There’s a nostalgic quality to the setting, too, as though something has been lost—or will be, unless the characters succeed.
The characters’ exchanges are theatrical throughout, evoking studied speeches with authentic accents and attuned, witty comebacks. But the prose also has the quality of stage directions, used to support people’s encounters, which are the action and main attraction. Sparse and discursive, the prose passages sometimes hold meaning at a distances; fight scenes and active moments are short on details.
Further, the book’s drama is not serious nor moral; absurdity gets the final word. A character in the final tale is “unfriendly for sport,” a fitting summary for the collection’s sardonic tone. The grisly bits, in particular in the first story, happen in the service of humor too. A series killer’s motive is landscaping; a naughty sheriff’s daughter is bored, not bad. No one is to blame in the collective mess the villains and victims make in these yarns, and their antics prolong the laughs rather than advance the development.
Kooky people vivify the satirical short story collection People Making Danger, which mixes the dark comedy of peripheral existence with the entertaining warmth of enduring ideals.
Reviewed by
Mari Carlson
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
