Other tales are filled with equally, and worse, caricatures — dumb Mafiosi, a man who decapitates his wife, and so on. Other tales are utterly pointless. For example, "A Morty Story" attempts to be a character portrait, but it just paints a portrait of dull people doing nothing, literally nothing but sitting around and looking in their refrigerators and lamenting a lack of good food. It does not elicit awe with its sterling prose, nor does it illuminate the interior nor exterior of its characters’ lives, which are simply that of a loser, his girlfriend, and his uncle Morty who mooches off of them. Here is one of Coen’s many limp attempts at humor:

For some reason Uncle Morty had reminded me of Edward G. Robinson. His face didn’t particularly look like Edward G.’s. His lips weren’t quite as big. And of course he didn’t talk in that snarly way. But he had that short square-bellied body and his nipples were big and saggy with dark hair sworled around them. Not that I knew what Edward G. Robinson’s nipples looked like.

The nipples of Edward G. Robinson? I repeat, the nipples of Edwar G. Robinson? This not even gross out humor. This is just dull and puerile, a writer with no genuine tale to tell, desperately scrambling for something to entertain, and being clueless as to what that thing could possibly be.

Equally so, Coen does not know how to end his tales effectively. The best story ends are usually epiphanies, or those tales that screech dead on a moment, and let the mind plow over the edge, wondering where it has been led, then buoying itself in the air. These tales have no depth, so any epiphanies would be contrived, and Coen seems utterly devoid of a sense of timing in his storytelling when not behind a camera.

As I said, different media require different approaches, and Coen is way out of his element in this form. Gates Of Eden's short stories are really just so-so treatments for short subject films, at best. See, I can be generous. I really can. But, I’ll waste no more space on this tripe. Let’s just hope Ethan Coen doesn’t pull a Tennessee Williams, and decide to gift us with his ‘poetry’ in the near future. KAPOW!