To be honest, this book,
Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy, is one I was looking forward to reading
more than any other book on my reading horizon. He is a young gun barely being
in his 30’s, which attracts me more than older writers, and he is getting
praise for his genre like tales from the likes of Peter Straub and Daniel
Woodrell, two very season writers in their separate fields of fiction. And, for
the most part, this is a solid collection of stories that tease you with full
on horror, but are really grounded in a sense of reality and human experience.
Percy is more in vain with someone like a Dan Chaon or Daniel Woodrell, who use
horror elements like violence, psychological unease or twists of fate and
personality to describe a type of experience that is all too real for the human
race, both sad and optimistic. Some of my favorites in this collection are the
title story, which tells of two adolescent boys who seek solace in violence
between each other to distract them from bullies and their fathers being
shipped off to war. “The Woods” is another cool gem that takes Raymond Carver’s
story “So Much Water So Close To Home” into full-on Bigfoot territory. “The
Killing” is cool revenge tale, and while the story “Whisper” is kind of dull,
it ends with cool twist that rewrites what you have read up to that point.
While a lot of these stories are good, some are duds, such as “Meltdown” a
post-apocalyptic story that never gets off the ground, and “The Caves of
Oregon” which promises something nefarious, but never delivers. But this is a
pretty solid collection that makes up for its weak spots with the potential
this young writer has to create something outstanding and marvelous.
Rating: 4/5
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