Reviewed by Alex Boyd

Fly On the Wall is a unique, if slightly lurid reading experience based on the idea that a fly would overhear various things that normally don’t see the light of day at all. These micro-fictions by Jason Brink are all over the place, from old ladies battling it out in a senior’s residence ("Put it back, bitch") to a father who confesses to his young son he just hurt some people at work moments before the police arrive, to a family digging up mom so she can be of "compost value" to the garden. Each story comes accompanied by a sharp pen-and-ink illustration by Jim Westergard but unfortunately, most of the stories aren’t terribly memorable. Here’s ’74 Nova, which I thought was one of the more interesting examples:

The fly clings to the glob of gravy stuck in the obese driver’s beard as he leans over to open the passenger door. The girl swings her backpack over the seat and hops in. The fly moves to the dashboard.

"Nova’s a car of destiny for me. As soon as I saw it I knew you’d stop."

"How’s that?" the driver asks as he pulls back out onto the highway.

"I was conceived in a Nova, I lost my virginity in a Nova, and last Christmas I got rear-ended by a Nova. My lawyer says I should get at least ten grand for whiplash."

The driver spots the sea-horse tattoo on her ankle. His gaze follows her bare legs all the way up to the frayed hem of her cut-offs.

She catches him looking.

"You know, you got some shit in your beard."

He checks himself in the rear-view mirror and finds the gravy clump. He raises his chin to peel off the last little bit.

"Look out!" she cries, a moment too late, as they drift into the oncoming logger truck.

Everyone in the book seems to be caught, doomed or already dead. One of the few examples of any sort of honest kindness in the book has to do with a guy using his finger to coax feces out of a paralyzed man. I can understand using the fly on the wall concept to visit private moments, but Brink seems to have also tapped into the way we associate flies with unpleasantness. It becomes a bit like watching one of those X-Files episodes that has a somewhat interesting idea in there somewhere, but it wasn’t worth meeting the vomit monster. It’s only fair to say this might be someone else’s cup of tea (the blurb states "These two guys are sick, sick, sick. And I love, love, love it," which I suppose is fair warning), but I found these to be story fragments that strike the same bleak note too frequently, even as they aren’t elaborate enough to be able to explain their own world-view.

Alex Boyd is the author of Making Bones Walk.