The first, and titular, tale is a good example, as it wastes a cameo appearance by Liston, who does not even make a good metaphor, and cops out for the clichéd victory in the end, and then adds to that with the boxer suddenly realizing that this lifestyle of his must end. I mean it. It really does that. And, worse, its characters all speak in affected dialogue that seems culled from a leftover reel of a bad Rocky sequel.

The next tale, The Roadrunner, is a stew of clichés, stereotypes, and ends with the sadism of a Vietnam-era soldier, just before heading over to the shit, setting the bird on fire. I was reminded of the stereotyped bunch of grunts from the film Saving Private Ryan.

Worse, the only point of the tale seems to be as a set up to a meager ‘revelation’ in the next tale — A Run Through The Jungle, which is just a bad tale featuring some of the same characters from The Roadrunner. Here’s what passes for irony in Jones’ book: the GI who dies in this tale, via his own phosphorus grenade burning from within, is the guy who torched the roadrunner from the prior tale. Revelation, my brother, revelation! Ain’t that, like, real Old Testament?

Fields Of Purple Forever also has the same characters, but strikes a potentially good metaphor by having one of the characters be a long-distance swimmer. Then, it does nothing with the character, nor metaphor. 40, Still At Home has a nice premise — a middle-aged loser is tossed out by his old mom, who then dies of cancer. Then the loser breaks into her home, finds his mom dead, tosses her in a freezer, and then drinks beer and watch tv. Here’s what passes for depth in Jones’ tale: ‘I can’t do it anymore.…I can’t hack it out there in middle-management hell… in your day people were still human.’ I guess you file this tale under the ‘I wanted to show how dull a life this loser led, so I did’ category.

Here’s some more of Jones’ sterling prose:

Ensconced in the Slumber King, Matthew Billis, who had been so tormented by relentless depression, who had come to feel so bad that not even taking a shit felt good, and who was bereft of a single endorphin, waited for the buzz of a lifetime. It was a buzz with a wow factor of ten. He bore witness to a glorious lotus blossom of joy opening in his stomach that sent out radiant orange tidal waves of orgasmic ecstasy — waves that pulsed up through the base of his brain, to the roots of his hair, and back down his spine to his arms, legs, fingers, and heels. In every fiber and place of his being, Matthew felt bliss - bliss that he realized had been lying in wait all along.