Official Review: Freeze Tag by John Biscello
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Official Review: Freeze Tag by John Biscello
[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Freeze Tag" by John Biscello.]
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Freeze Tag is a collection of short stories and one novella by John Biscello. Most of the stories are set in Brooklyn and explore nostalgia and lost childhoods. They are narrated by different characters, but all of them are males looking back on what tied them to Brooklyn, be it family, friends, or old flames. The exception is Baby Talk, which takes place in Manhattan.
The Bottom Feeders is about Alex, who is leaving Brooklyn for San Francisco to pursue his writing career. His friend Henry, who smokes cigars and listens to Sinatra, throws him a going away party at a strip club, inviting a few of their friends along. There’s Ren, a reclusive pianist who is medically unable to go out in sunlight, Zag, an ex-con with violent tendencies, and JoJo, a TV addict who falls in love with a stripper. The highlights are underage drinking, assault, prostitution, misogyny, homophobia, and racial slurs.
1923 is less of a short story and more of a one page musing on an old photograph. The narrator is looking at a photo of his grandmother and her sister taken on Coney Island in 1923 and thinking about how photographs are inadequate snapshots of a life. He feels like the woman in the photo is not so much his grandmother, as an actress who played a young grandmother, and that in photos of himself, he doesn’t see his face, but sees who he thought he was when they were taken.
In Fruit, young Alex sees his uncle, a fruit vendor and a junkie, get beaten in the street by a loan shark and his henchman. He recalls the blood soaked bandages his uncle cleaned up with and the way that his grandmother’s hands trembled in fear for her son. As he is still young, Alex doesn’t really know how to deal with violence and feels ashamed, so he decides to forget and pretend that it never really happened at all.
Where We Tread is about Emilio, a comic book artist in San Francisco who comes home to Brooklyn after learning about the death of Ilya, a girl he once loved. For the first time in nine years, he sees his father and his old friends. Both Ilya and his mother committed suicide by overdose, and there is no one that he can really talk with about either woman. Emilio drunkenly visits Ilya’s abusive ex-husband Angelo and shows him the new comic he is working on in honor of Ilya, which helps him find some closure.
Baby Talk is the only story that is set in Manhattan and has no connection to Brooklyn. Alex and Jeannie share an apartment together with Jeannie’s mother, who lives in Connecticut and comes to New York on the weekends. One evening, Alex is home alone, high and watching The Birds, when Jeannie’s mother Susan comes home. She is drunk and begins talking to Alex in baby talk and coming on to him. When Jeannie comes home, Susan goes to her room and Jeannie confides that her mother has a history of seducing her boyfriends.
A Battle for the Ages is the last of the collection and a novella. It is also the only story that is written in third person. Danny, a junior high boy, spends his summer dealing with his alcoholic father, his depressed mother’s new obsession with self-help books, and his wild friends. When Danny’s mother threatens to leave his father for good, he checks into rehab. Instead of the fun summer he had imagined, full of war games and freedom, Danny gets a job with his friend as a delivery boy. As the summer passes, his friends start to drift apart, realizing that as they grow up, they are becoming different people with little in common. Before school starts, Danny meets someone unexpected and things take a dark turn.
Freeze Tag is a lackluster collection with no cohesion. There doesn't seem to be much tying the stories together, other than the theme of nostalgia and the fact that they are all set in Brooklyn, except for Baby Talk. I was anticipating more exploration of what makes Brooklyn unique from other places, but the stories could be set anywhere and still remain the same. The stylistic choices of the author to omit quotation marks, use punctuation fluidly, and run words together didn't work for me, and just made reading it awkward and stilted. It is also unclear whether the narrators are the same character, or how often the narrator switches. Bottom Feeders, Fruit, and Baby Talk are narrated by Alex, though it is unclear whether this is the same Alex, or three different ones. 1923 never mentions the narrator’s name, and the other two are different.
I am giving Freeze Tag a rating of one out of four stars. I found it to be a random jumble of poorly written oddities, none of which were engaging enough to keep my interest. The writing style is annoyingly idiosyncratic and the stories themselves lacked any threads to bind them together as a cohesive unit.
***
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The Bottom Feeders is about Alex, who is leaving Brooklyn for San Francisco to pursue his writing career. His friend Henry, who smokes cigars and listens to Sinatra, throws him a going away party at a strip club, inviting a few of their friends along. There’s Ren, a reclusive pianist who is medically unable to go out in sunlight, Zag, an ex-con with violent tendencies, and JoJo, a TV addict who falls in love with a stripper. The highlights are underage drinking, assault, prostitution, misogyny, homophobia, and racial slurs.
1923 is less of a short story and more of a one page musing on an old photograph. The narrator is looking at a photo of his grandmother and her sister taken on Coney Island in 1923 and thinking about how photographs are inadequate snapshots of a life. He feels like the woman in the photo is not so much his grandmother, as an actress who played a young grandmother, and that in photos of himself, he doesn’t see his face, but sees who he thought he was when they were taken.
In Fruit, young Alex sees his uncle, a fruit vendor and a junkie, get beaten in the street by a loan shark and his henchman. He recalls the blood soaked bandages his uncle cleaned up with and the way that his grandmother’s hands trembled in fear for her son. As he is still young, Alex doesn’t really know how to deal with violence and feels ashamed, so he decides to forget and pretend that it never really happened at all.
Where We Tread is about Emilio, a comic book artist in San Francisco who comes home to Brooklyn after learning about the death of Ilya, a girl he once loved. For the first time in nine years, he sees his father and his old friends. Both Ilya and his mother committed suicide by overdose, and there is no one that he can really talk with about either woman. Emilio drunkenly visits Ilya’s abusive ex-husband Angelo and shows him the new comic he is working on in honor of Ilya, which helps him find some closure.
Baby Talk is the only story that is set in Manhattan and has no connection to Brooklyn. Alex and Jeannie share an apartment together with Jeannie’s mother, who lives in Connecticut and comes to New York on the weekends. One evening, Alex is home alone, high and watching The Birds, when Jeannie’s mother Susan comes home. She is drunk and begins talking to Alex in baby talk and coming on to him. When Jeannie comes home, Susan goes to her room and Jeannie confides that her mother has a history of seducing her boyfriends.
A Battle for the Ages is the last of the collection and a novella. It is also the only story that is written in third person. Danny, a junior high boy, spends his summer dealing with his alcoholic father, his depressed mother’s new obsession with self-help books, and his wild friends. When Danny’s mother threatens to leave his father for good, he checks into rehab. Instead of the fun summer he had imagined, full of war games and freedom, Danny gets a job with his friend as a delivery boy. As the summer passes, his friends start to drift apart, realizing that as they grow up, they are becoming different people with little in common. Before school starts, Danny meets someone unexpected and things take a dark turn.
Freeze Tag is a lackluster collection with no cohesion. There doesn't seem to be much tying the stories together, other than the theme of nostalgia and the fact that they are all set in Brooklyn, except for Baby Talk. I was anticipating more exploration of what makes Brooklyn unique from other places, but the stories could be set anywhere and still remain the same. The stylistic choices of the author to omit quotation marks, use punctuation fluidly, and run words together didn't work for me, and just made reading it awkward and stilted. It is also unclear whether the narrators are the same character, or how often the narrator switches. Bottom Feeders, Fruit, and Baby Talk are narrated by Alex, though it is unclear whether this is the same Alex, or three different ones. 1923 never mentions the narrator’s name, and the other two are different.
I am giving Freeze Tag a rating of one out of four stars. I found it to be a random jumble of poorly written oddities, none of which were engaging enough to keep my interest. The writing style is annoyingly idiosyncratic and the stories themselves lacked any threads to bind them together as a cohesive unit.
***
Buy "Freeze Tag" on Amazon
Latest Review: The Crystilleries of Echoland by Dew Pellucid
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jbiscello
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The reviewer left out solipsistic, self-indulgent and excretory, but there's always next book 
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