Death Sentences: Tales of Punishment & Revenge
by Matthew Warner
Artwork by Deena Warner
Publisher: Undaunted Press

Collections can be a tricky review realm. They don’t have the length offered up by novels, making it way too easy to give stuff away, or they just don’t have the meat that allows for decent analysis. And all too often a writer’s voice in one story will be similar throughout all of the stories, making it tough to distinguish them from one another. Matt Warner’s Death Sentences: Tales of Punishment and Revenge smashes those notions square in the face with a bloody stump. But I don’t want to give you the wrong idea – while Warner can deftly describe a body being ripped in two, a couple of these stories demonstrate a sophisticated style that separates them from the regular rabble. He’s onto something in his writing, perhaps new to even him, and you can see it happening. You don’t always need to scream; sometimes a damaged whisper will get the job done for you a lot better, and Warner’s wise to that little secret now. You’ll find it best demonstrated in Angel’s Wing and Middle Passage. There are a total of five stories but those two seal the deal.

I read an advance review copy of Death Sentences but if the order stays the same, the first up is Middle Passage, the story of slaves Poro and daughter Sametta. They’re being transported across the middle passage along with hundreds of other slaves. Carcasses, vomit, disease and worse are their constant companions, and I had to reconcile those images with the fact that it’s beautifully written. Prose shouldn’t be this eloquent when showing you something this hideous. But it is, and the empathy Warner twists out of you is simply filthy. This one’s a wrecker and it only goes downhill from there - or uphill depending on how you look at getting masterfully manipulated by a writer who would definitely grin, and maybe even giggle, if he knew he’d been responsible for your loss of sleep.

The next story, Angel’s Wings, is hands down my favorite. Mash-ups in literature have been going on long before they became the soup du jour in music, and this baby is a head-on collision of Flannery O’Connor and Clive Barker. Sprouting from a Southern gothic landscape and loaded in visceral imagery, this’ll have you wishing you could give your brain a good soaping down. Jesus wept indeed. Good Southern gothic has long been described as capturing the decaying South and its damned people. Warner has captured them - and may still have them holed up in his cellar. Into all this he adds a slipstream edge that almost gives it a dreamy, hallucinatory quality. He probably tells us a little more than he should, and he’s still working on holding a consistent voice, but he’s getting it. He’s finding it.

If there are any stories in here that have a similar thread in them it’s The Cave and A Second Chance, as they both deal with a son’s attempts to deal with his parents' divorce, but both stories take radically different tacks in covering this ground and both pack powerful endings. Warner adds some interesting author’s notes at the end of the collection, and you find out that this comes from an extremely personal arena for him. These stories indicate that he’s either working these issues out very well via cathartic writing, or they indicate that someone should call the cops. Either way makes for great stories. The Cave will also appear in an upcoming issue of Cemetery Dance as well.

He wraps things up with The Forgiving Type, a story pulling its setting from the gruesome news we've heard of late concerning crematoriums and mortuaries that may not be doing what they should with your loved ones. Warner makes good use of this rich fodder without relying on it to be the point. The core of the story comes from somewhere else altogether, showing you that the most chilling of things don't have to come from without.

To the point - this is a rock solid collection of stories: two good, two great and one pushing brilliant. Warner has found something in his writing and I'm expecting he'll find his way back to these parts again. Looking forward to it.

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