Review of Mr. Gager's collection of short stories.

Twenty-Six Pack. Tim Gager. ( www.deadendpress.com)
318 pages. 2002. $15.

I've met Tim Gager, founder of the Dire Reader Series in Cambridge, Ma., and he impressed me as a sensitive-doting-father, sort-of-a-guy, certainly not someone who would pen a collection of short stories we have here in Twenty-Six Pack. But obviously Mr. Gager has tapped into a well of hard-bitten, working-class rage and mined it for what it is worth. Gager's prose is unadorned and spare, but its impact is that of " a slap in the face, or the cold butt of a 45," to coin a phrase. Gager's fictional world is occupied by folks with bad-elbows, bad marriages, and bad habits. They live in and around Boston, and for most in the words of Yeats, " the center doesn't hold." One might argue that the characters in Mr. Gager's novel have to be more fleshed out. But in light of their narrow, constricted and provincial lives, the economy
practiced here is fitting. Gager gives it to us straight with no chaser...read at your own risk.

Doug Holder

* This review appeared on deadendstreet.com