100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories

by Michael A. Arnzen

Book Overview

Arnzen has honed his craft to deliver the highest voltage using the fewest words in this collection of 100 short stories, guaranteed to stun. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0974503126
• ISBN13: 9780974503127
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

This book twangs!

Ever stick your tongue on a fresh 9-volt battery? This clever collection is appropriately titled. Each little story sends a shock straight into your literary central nervous system. Some pieces are disturbing. Some are funny. Some are heart-wrenching. But they're all short, and they're all frightening. If you want to be entertained, moved, jolted, this is a collection for you.

It's Terrorific

horror n 1: intense and profound fear 2: something that inspires horror; something horrible; "the painting that others found so beautiful was a horror to him" 3: intense aversion See: repugnance, repulsion, revulsion, short story n. A short piece of prose fiction, having few characters and aiming at unity of effect. Michael Arnzen is master craftsman of the horror short story. Mixing elements of gore, humor, and horror, sometimes within the same sentence, he shocks and entertains with every bite. If you need proof just read a few stories in. Most of the stories here can be read in one paranoid insomnia driven night. He uses words like a scalpel, cutting open your head and dumping a bucket of psycho-babble right into your raw exposed brain. The stories will leave your head throbbing, you'll find yourself thinking of the stories relating to them in new ways weeks even months later. But what really impressed me about 100 jolts is the balance. The blatant to the subtle, the humorous with the terrifying, the short with the long, flowing mercilessly one to another. It all balances out, and it's balance lends it to become an addictive read. You keep saying, just one more, oh just one more, and then it's dawn and you've read the book, and your head is throbbing. And you're not sure if it's with joy or if your brain is trying to escape from your skull. One way or another this book will get you. Howl with the raw dog screaming.

Flash in the pan sizzles with flavor

100 Jolts is a book comprised of what is called "Flash Fiction", a type of very brief fiction pieces that has gained a lot of popularity in the computerized publishing age. When reading online magazines, one does not want to scroll forever, and the eyes will tire; which is where flash fiction lights up to its best advantage.Whether calling it Flash Fiction or Minimalist Horror, 100 Jolts is a shockingly delightful romp through some very sticky, and very slimy, situations. Michael Arnzen clearly demonstrates that he has been working with Flash for some time, showing off these bereft-poetry-haiku type of "smack you in the face" stories with style and substance. We have all occasionally read those droll books where an author takes a 50 page story and pads it into 500 pages of tedious reading, and 100 Jolts is the exact opposite of those snooze fests. In this book, there is the sense that a 50 page story has been pared down past the meat into the skeletal frame and left us quivering with the ringing of steel on bone, as Arnzen slices off the juiciest of the story just for us, handing it out to us on a tiny platter, a toothy grin gracing his face.Well, eat up, boys and girls! 100 Jolts is one of the best collections of this new type of fiction I have seen yet. There were a few pieces that left me disappointed, having the feeling of a muse or a simply jotted idea, but the rest of this thin volume left my hunger satisfied and my mind whirling with the impact, exactly how the author intended.And for those of us with a warped or twisted sense of humor, you will find a chuckle or two lurking here also.Some of my favorites include: Skull Fragments, Take Out, Stabbing For Dummies, White Out, The Seven Headed Beast, Psycho Hunter, Inside The Man With No Eyelids, Burning Bridges, Next Door, Nightmare Job #3, Five Mean Machines, The Eight Ball In Big Mouth's Pocket, An Evil Eye, The Blood Ran Out, How To Grow A Man Eating Plant, and Domestic Fowl.Those are just a tiny sampling of the works collected here. With stories ranging from two or three sentences to two or three pages, this book is perfect for a beach afternoon, a late night flight, or a nice little story before bedtime. Enjoy!

Fantastic, unique collection of stories

"Flash fiction," by nature of its brevity, needs to be evocative and often must point outside the world of each story to achieve the full effect. As a happy coincidence, one of the strategies that makes horror fiction so effective can be the hinted-at moments that the author never makes explicit--the moments that might even be too horrible to imagine. With 100 JOLTS, Michael Arnzen offers an original, unique collection of "shockingly short stories" that beautifully exploits this connection between horror and the unsaid, the unimaginable. There's a nice rhythm to the book that really pulls the reader in, a shifting between humor and straightforward horror--you never know quite what to expect. The writing is so nicely compressed here that it has the feel of a MUCH larger collection: a flash story as Arnzen conceives it definitely has the same impact as a full short story. This is a fantastic, unique collection of stories. Highly recommended.

100 Jolts by Michael A Arnzen

Short, sharp and definitely shocking. Whatever your taste in horror, '100 Jolts' will have a story for you. Intensively strong in style and content, highly addictive narrative. Arnzen gives horror again and again in bite sized shorts - you won't want to put it down.Highly recommended.