The Land Where We Become Ourselves

Robert Pope's stories are vibrant adventures into the unknown. They veer gleefully from visceral, earthy tales of insanity, crime and delusion, all the way to playful, surreal and often absurd outings to a world not unlike our own. Jo Rosina Harlow, short fiction writer, Dark Lane Anthology, The Ghastling, & others I think Robert Pope must be one of the most capable short story writers around. His writing reminds me of such luminaries as Marquez, Vonnegut, Highsmith, Jackson, Cheever and Carver. Yet Pope's stories-by turns strange, tender, funny, shocking-seem to me very much his own. They hold the reader, provoking thought, even a distracted wonder. They're written in a sparse yet elegant and indeed vivid way, with passages that are at times quite brilliant. All these things, to my mind, are hallmarks of a contemporary master." Matthew G. Rees, The Feast, Smoke House, Keyhole, & The Snow Leopard of Moscow For godssake listen to Bob Pope read you his stories. Give him a wry crinkled voice, sometimes Ray Bradbury sometimes David Lynch circa The Straight Story. Some of these are mid-century pulp nasties, some Hitchcockian time-bombs, others horrors in casual clothes. Bob nails childhood's roving drunk paganism then spins to adults in all their adulterousness. His stories are insidious and limber and humane, droll then petrifying. Bob Pope is a jolly papa who plays at monster then actually swallows you. Jeremy Tenenbaum, Editor, SORTES The land where we become ourselves is a land of myth and fable as well as the concrete real; a land in which unwitting, ill-fitting, or downright duplicitous characters meet their dates with destiny, real or imagined, merciful or perilous. It's also a land of beasts and forests and hospitals and barstools, coexisting in a fun and fabulous danse macabre that bring this fictional landscape to light. It's a land that requires a passport that only arch fabricator and gifted counterfeiter Robert Pope could forge. And, by Jove, he's done it! What splendid medicine for this jaundiced age! John Bullock, Mark Small: This Is Your Life, fiction editor, Sheila-Na-Gig press