Book review by: Christina O.
Favorite Quote: “…the shreds have hardened and clink against each other. I’m a human wind chime. Hey, man, can you hear me now?”
Full disclosure: I never meant to buy this book. It wasn’t on my reading to-do list, I didn’t have a friend recommend it to me, and when it popped up in the “Suggested For You!” column on Amazon just as I was about to start checking out, the title didn’t ring any bells. It was lightly used and around $5 and I had a gift-card to burn, so I shrugged and clicked “add to cart”.
My impulse buys are unsuccessful 95% of the time. In college, I had box full of random stuff I bought online that fell far, far short of my expectations. But I’m happy report that just like the wine bottle cutter I bought off a questionable Slovenian website, 420 Characters falls into the elusive 5% where my small collection of random shopping Holy Grails happily reside.
420 Characters is an assortment of micro-stories that are intensely visceral, amusingly neurotic, and refreshingly short- only four-hundred and twenty characters long, to be precise. The collection’s strength is in its astounding diversity of characters, settings, and themes, all of which are only revealed in tiny pieces but still manage to make you feel a spectrum of emotion that ranges from wistful to “ew”. The stories feel like wittily narrated dreams that Lou Beach only half remembered, rolling over in the middle of the night to jot them down before falling back asleep. They’re exactly what you’d expect from an author who decided to go with two wolf-bird hybrids and the blurb “Holy sh*t! These are great!” as his cover art.
Like any short story collection, some of the pieces are better than others. There were about eight or nine that I bookmarked, and only a handful that I flat out disliked. My biggest critique of 420 Characters is that after about fifteen pages or so, you get fed up. The abrupt starting and stopping of the stories starts to wear on you, which incidentally ended up working in my favor. I got annoyed with 420 Characters about 1/3 of the way through and started reading The Mists of Avalon– a 900 paged beast of a book that requires systematic breaks. I ended up reading the two books at the same time, and I honestly don’t think I could have truly appreciated one without the other, let alone finish them. I’m well aware that they’re the strangest pairing in the history of literature, but you get the idea. In order to really get the most out of 420 Characters, read it in increments or use it to break up a bigger book.
booknectar tip: If reading online is your thing or you want to get a taste of 420 Characters before you buy it, head over to 420characters.net. There, you’ll find the entire collection of stories for free.
