Do Not Read Before Bedtime

*Warning: Do not click on the Tubgirl hyperlink unless you’re a vile, filthy, vermin who wants to go to hell and likes eating babies

Tales of Woe by John Reed

MTV Press, 2010

199 pages

OK, Let’s start off by acknowledging that I like literature that’s dark. How dark? Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero and Glamorama were probably the three books that convinced me to try writing fiction. Not exactly some limp-wristed nonsense from Nicholas Sparks or that chick who wrote The Lovely Bones. How dark are some of my other favorite books, like Pauline Réage’s Story of O and Ellis’ American Psycho? Pretty fucking dark and/or disturbingly dark.

How dark is Tales of Woe? John Reed’s chronicle of unabated misery is so goddamned dark that even the book’s pages are colored black. (Well, not all of them. There’s a bunch of artwork, but we’ll get to that later.)

What sets Tales of Woe apart from the other books I’ve mentioned, at least in the Obvious Department, is that its 25 stories are more or less journalistic accounts of recent true events, and not the product of some deranged novelist’s warped psyche.

In most of the popular fictional American “arts” – drama, literature, movies, television – the contemporary reader or viewer has been conditioned to expect some kind of redemption, a clean resolution, the faintest glint of hope even in death. (This inherent need for positivism is also abundant in non-fiction: The junkie who writes a harrowing autobiography is now a sober, well-adjusted member of society! The oil spill in the mostly bleak environmental documentary can still be cleaned! Those pelicans will fly again!) The problem with this (and thus the desperate forays into the fairy-tale land of escapism) is that much of what goes on in our twisted “real world” is vile, senseless, pure, un-refracted evil drinking from a tall glass of hopelessness. Yummy. And though journalism has been called (by DeLillo, I think?) the last great literature, because it so accurately captures the essence (in a format that requires little to no attention span) of our society, there are many stories that only appear in abridged form, that aren’t given an appropriate follow-up or a long enough news cycle, and that are ignored completely by the major media simply because the relentless suffering they describe is too much for a cookie-baking, Sunday-school-teaching mother from Indianapolis to handle.

These are the stories in Tales of Woe. A baby whose brain is devoured by a baboon in front of the child’s mother. A 15-year-old Russian girl whose father makes her become a prostitute, then rapes and brutally murders her. A toddler left alone for three weeks to die. Nothing but grief, squalor, disappointment. Just..the…WOE (or whoa!). Each of the stories is related in Reed’s spare, polished newscaster’s prose, a dead-pan delivery so bereft of sympathy that many of the tales are rendered more unbearable and horrifying than the most splatter- and semen-filled descriptions from Ellis and Palahniuk. And Reed doesn’t stop there. He’s gone to great, almost obsessive lengths – sifting through thousands of interviews, perusing Internet chat room threads, court, government and legal documents, and pouring over pages of statistics and primary sources – to ensure that every gut-scorching detail is “fleshed” out. That each tale, in as little space as possible, transforms into a fascinating, three-dimensional ball of unrequited sadness.

from http://elisa-alba.com/blog/?p=4

And so, the big question is, Should you read this book? My roommates, whose minds have been hardened for years by the likes of rotten.com and Tubgirl, felt disturbed enough to put Tales of Woe down after only reading a couple stories (or perhaps it was the more-entertaining Snooki whoring her troll ass around the TV screen). I was in a shaky mental state myself (from seeing an upskirt of Snooki) and I almost did the same thing. But I’m so glad I didn’t.

Because the more I read, the more enthralled I became. It wasn’t a feeling of schadenfreude (gaining personal happiness from others’ misfortunes) because there is no joy in Woeville; and there wasn’t a catharsis in the redemptive, American, Forest-Gump-like sense of the word. There was only relief, and an overwhelming thankfulness that I’m not an albino in Tanzania who’s prized by witch doctors for my genitals, that I’m not so poor that I have to sell my kidneys to an illegal organ harvesting ring, that my own tale of woe has not yet come to fruition. And, of course, a genuine respect for the extensive detective work Reed underwent in order to unearth the tragic underbelly of these sinister times we all have to share. This is some real shit.

But Tales of Woe isn't all darkness. The book features dozens of colorful illustrations by a handful of deviant artists like 8Pussy and Michelle Witchiepoo. Depicting events from the stories, the drawings are cartoon-like, ghoulish, amusingly grotesque, what I imagine are tacked to Suicide Girls' bedroom walls (and other freaks who spent too much time at Hot Topic in middle school). The unrealistic nature of the images adds some levity to otherwise dire situations. Also, anyone with a particularly morbid sense of humor will find the stories' titles -- "Bouncing Baby Baboony", "Bloody, Squishy Pipe Dream" -- to be pretty hilarious.

What this all festers down to is that Tales of Woe isn't for everyone. But if there's one thing most Americans love as much, if not more, than a happy ending, it's the shock value of a horrific crime scene. Or, stated more succinctly by a police investigator working on a case about a teenager who crashed her Porsche and had her head sheared in two: “I defy you not to look.”