Do As I Say and Not As I Do

The seven stories in this collected volume of short fiction, Do As I Say and Not As I Do, reflect author Mark Lamb's experiences as a parent. The trials and tribulations of being responsible for children impacts all parents deeply, and Lamb has let his formidable imagination run with this theme. The verities of human commitment and development go to some strange, beautiful, and disturbing places in these stories. Lamb's narrative voice is distinct, simultaneously detached and vaguely sympathetic, non-judgmental, but not quite comforting. He has arrived at this, his first volume, with an identifiable style. What irony that is found here is flat, then twisted through a kaleidoscope, making it invisible or merely suggested. There is a Southern Gothic seasoning, somewhere in the tonal and topical region where Poe's less macabre vignettes and Capote's Music for Chameleons might intermix. But his characters are all too real: Lamb shows us the good, the bad, the ugly, and the perverse, and doesn't flinch from representing the messy, at times grotesque, shortcomings of people as they really live. The settings for the stories cover a broad range: Science fiction ("You Must Remember This"); the dangerous early American frontier ("Pigeon Roost"); unsettling psychosexual set pieces ("Station Approach," "Grand Guignol," "Mr. Wiggin's Jar"); the everyday, humdrum worlds of confused relationships and motives that most of us inhabit, however tentatively ("The Gosling Patch," "Mixed State"). There is an ambience - it is not magic realism, more like rational surrealism - suffusing all of Lamb's stories, even those grounded in the empirical here-and-now. A certain spooky, ambient unity thus pervades the collection, handled by a writer who knows exactly what he wants to accomplish. "Station Approach" and "You Must Remember This" are destined to be considered American short story classics. Lamb's love of both classic and contemporary cinema suffuses his work with vivid scenes and layers of dramatic implication. He occasionally shines an Hitchcockian sentiment - humor so dry it cracks into dust, suspense and twists to confound our linear expectations - onto the dramatic proceedings. The tautness of the stories, intentional flattening of character, and the condensed, potent atmospherics are really but one step short of screenplays. Readers will, of course, discover their own interpretive themes and historical and stylistic comparisons when confronted with the seven masterful stories in Mark Lamb's Do As I Say and Not As I Do. One thing is for sure: They will never forget them.