Dead Boys: Stories

by Richard Lange

Book Overview

These hard-hitting, deeply felt stories follow straight arrows and outlaws, have-it-alls and outcasts, as they take stock of their lives and missteps and struggle to rise above their turbulent pasts.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316018805
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.7" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Richard Lang Knows You, Do You Know Him?

You know Richard Lange. You have to know him. The name must be a lie, and you must know him. He must be your most trusted confidant, your therapist, your best friend, someone that you know. Somehow, sometime, he had to have taken a cork-screw to the back of your head and slowly twisted it into your skull until your most subconscious thoughts and feelings started pouring out like wine. He caught that liquid thought, and his pen became drunk from writing with it. Everything that you feel that is too honest to allow yourself to verbalize has ended up in "Dead Boys." All that is in your brain that is too real, too raw for you handle, has been laid out in front of you in short stories by this stranger. That's why he can't be a stranger, he must know you, for he knows things about you that you don't even know. The insecurity you have with your long-term relationship that is plaguing your sanity is there, in that prose. So is your tendency to alienate the people for whom you care the most, the way you hit the bottle and blame your problems on your dead wife, and how it sickens you that people (including yourself) live and operate in the manner that they do. It's all there. Those things about you that are, at the same time, the most pitiful and the most beautiful, the stories behind the story of your life, are in Lange's narratives. He has read your mind, and it's about time that you read it, as well. Reviewed by Jordan Dacayanan

Raw, Microscopically Examined Los Angeles

Richard Lange has a voice, at times rasty, at times corrosive, and at time tenderly longing for something better than what life has dealt him. And that 'voice' he places in the first person narrative in each of these twelve very pungent short stories that comprise his debut on the writing scene. He is impressive and he is immensely readable. Lange has an affinity for the ordinary, his characters emerge from the woodwork of sun-baked Los Angeles and become involved in actions and situations that some may find unbelievable, but for those who have observed the peculiar disparity of characters that inhabit the city of Angels, these odd folks seem somehow familiar. In assuming the narrative role in each story Lange makes his aberrant stories more real and at times the story line drifts around like complacent weather reports while at other times little things go wrong with the intensity of the abrupt Santana winds that alter the landscape and psychological bearings of the inhabitants of the city. He has a way with phrasing that makes the reader see the stage of the story clearly: 'He swings out into traffic and we're gobbled up into the steaming maw of the city, where we disappear for good'. 'We pass an accident on the way back to her place, just a fender bender, but still my thoughts go to our parents. When they died I was almost to the point where I could see them as people. With a little more time I might even have started loving them again. What did they stand for? What secrets did they take with them? It was the first great loss of my life'. The samples are endless. If Lange's story lines amble away from center focus at times, leaving the reader with the question of what the point of the diversion may be, he makes up for these off-road diversions with his poignant language and startling reactions to common things. It will be interesting to read a novel by Richard Lange: with all the endless interesting characters he introduces in these twelve stories he demonstrates the depth of his imagination that indicates he has miles to go on each tale. For this reader he is a welcome new voice on the literary scene, a man of the earth who doesn't mind the dust life kicks up here and there. Grady Harp, February 08

Outstanding

Dead Boys has the best short stories I've read in decades. The author writes better than any of the top 10 novelists. The characters are real and haunting. These kinds of people are rarely written about. The stories are tough and tragic and always authentic.

Move over, Tom Waites--there's a new urban poet in town

Busted! Yes, we all suspected there was a literate mole in our midst as we slumped over our cheap tacos, as we counted out change for happy hour, as we struggled with the nightmare of modern American life. The only flaw in these magnificently controlled stories is perhaps the book's title--its connotation may dissuade some readers from otherwise discovering this uncannily observed collection of first-person messages from the Real America, the writhing male soul, the reluctant survivor of betrayed myths and egos, and most excruciating of all--a remnant of trust that love still matters. "Dead Boys" blew my mind, and it will yours. Ten stars, dude.

5-Star Short Story collection

The media is saturated with sordid tales of celebrity in Los Angeles. But seldom do you hear about the ordinary human beings that celebrities walk among. But in his debut collection of short stories, Dead Boys, Richard Lange examines the human condition of the workingman--living, breathing, struggling, and dying against the desolate landscape of the city of angels. "The wiry grass and twisted, oily shrubs that pick up where the roads dead-end and the sprinkler systems peter out are just waiting for an excuse to burst into flame," Lange writes of the city's wildfires, in one short story. --Lange writes of a salesman who struggles to comprehend his sister's brutal rape and the complexities of their tenuous relationship. --Then there's a widower, living the fast life of drugs and booze, haunted by the vengefulness of his deceased wife. --A newsstand attendant tries to get in touch with an old girlfriend and becomes paranoid that a group of Vietnamese gangsters are out to get him. --Another man smokes too much marijuana and ends up in the middle of the desert in a singed woman's dress. --Yet another yearns to break free of his everyday regimen. Like those wildfires that rip haphazardly through the Los Angeles brush, Lange's cast of flawed male characters wander through an aimless existence in the fast-paced city. Each story focuses on a different man haunted by moral instability and a past from which they are unable to detach themselves. Each of the 12 short stories is presented in first person, adding an element of stark reality and a relatable quality to each character. Lange asserts these moving accounts with such intensity that even the grittiest, most formidable scenes of desperation are articulated with such precision and honesty in this debut tour de force. A solid, stunningly accurate short-story collection, Lange's dead-on writing is reminiscent of the greats: Capote, Bradbury, Salinger. Armchair Interviews says: This book glows brighter than the scorching, ravaging Los Angeles fires.