Review by Weston Ochse © 2002

Edward Bryant has received multiple Nebula and American Mystery Awards. He has written hundreds of short stories and articles. He is a regular contributor to Locus Magazine and Talebones. He has published more than a dozen books, including a collaboration with Harlan Ellison. His stories have been adapted for CBS's Twilight Zone and Lifetime's The Hidden Room. Yet within this prodigious body of work, the singular story he describes as the most graphic thing he's ever written is A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned.

And it is fabulous in its relentlessly unflinching nastiness.

A Sad Last Love was originally published in The Book of the Dead -- described by Edward Bryant as John Skipp and Craig Spector's 'singing, dancing, all-chomping, all-gnashing, all-carnivore original anthology of tales set in the zombie holocaust world of George Romero's Night of the Living..., Day of the..., and Dawn of the Dead.' A Sad Last Love has been called splatter-punk by some and is considered by others to out-gross all the other tales in an anthology that still maintains a prominent, dust-free diorama in the Museum of Gross and Visceral Literature.

Edward Bryant claims to never have actually scared himself with his own writing. Even with this story he maintains that to be true. In fact, scared isn't the adjective he felt at all when he typed out the words The End, sat back in his creaking wooden chair and froze. Appalled is a more appropriate word. Yep. Edward Bryant was appalled.

So then what was it? Why was he so appalled?

Was he appalled with the apparent ease of his ability to successfully compare entrails to ziplock bags filled with lasagna?

Was he appalled that he'd written of zombies who, in a last desiccated gasp of carnal glee, gang-rape then consume the object of their desire?

Or was he appalled that a mid-western boy like himself was capable of producing such unsettling scenes and images that wanted posters must assuredly be plastered on the walls of bingo halls, barber shops and laundromats across America, the fine print warning the geriatric gentry of his ability to simultaneously produce evil objects of art and gargle poodles.

Appalled he may have been, but that's the way a writer should handle zombies. A writer is allowed special dispensation when writing about this most terrifying of monsters. So what is it about them? Is it that when we die some one or some thing can make use of us against our will? Is it that voodoo dreams are too close to reality for even the most strident unbeliever? Or is it because to be eaten alive by a friend, lover or even stranger, to feel clamping, grinding and chewing upon one's own body is enough to shatter the core of one's humanity like a super-nova epiphany. In this case, I believe appalling is a good thing. Where zombies are concerned, being appalling should even be encouraged.

What I find majestic in A Sad Last Love is Edward Bryant's juxtaposition of the mundane upon the insane. Within the fish bowl of a diner, zombies scratch at the plate glass windows even as customers and a waitress conduct business as usual. Not just a writer's slight of hand, this clever maneuver shows a solid understanding of the difficulties that people have coping with holocaust realities. One can't but wonder if the citizens of Pompeii, Dresden and Baghdad struggled equally in the hopes that if they ignored the heraldic warnings of impending doom and pretended that the threat of death wasn't real, the truth could be subverted.

We can thank Wormhole Books for, not only making A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned available to us again, but also for packaging it so damned wonderfully. Each of their chapbooks is printed on premium acid-free papers and limited to a maximum of 750 numbered, 32 lettered copies and 250 numbered hand-stitched hardbacks. Whether hardback or soft cover, each book comes with a hard plastic, full-color bookmark featuring artwork from the cover as well as a recipe closely associated with the story-in this case a recipe for a Zombie Stew so lip-smackingly good enough to send Wolfgang Puck on a two-year Vegan Sabbatical.

In addition to Edward Bryant, Wormhole has published the works of Steve and Melanie Tem, P.D. Cacek, Dawn Dunn, Stewart O'Nan, Judith Post, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Alex Irvine, John Kennedy and Connie Willis. Wormhole's motto is 'handmade books for a mass-produced century.' Using archival standards, each book is destined to last. Some of the books boast art from Alan Clark, Joanna Erbach and David Martin. The cover of A Sad Last Love is an amazing, full-color, wrap-around picture of the Diner of the Damned and its denizens-both inside and out.

Wormhole Books fills an important niche in the publishing industry. From the 1800's dissertations on transcendentalism to the beat explosion of 1955, chapbooks have been an inexpensive method for both author and publisher to provide important works on a small scale to a mass audience. In this case, Wormhole has possibly surpassed its goal and appears to have been gifted the mantle of the Easton Press of Chapbooks.

Collectible and elegant, A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned is a perfect example of an older work re-emerging to entertain a new generation of readers. For it is with precision language and a days-gone-by Middle American sensibility that Edward Bryant delivers unflinching, unfettered violence in a story that leaves the reader as surprised as a 'gaffed fish' jerked from its peaceful place in the universe to the sun-bleached boards of a lonely dock where it lays bleeding and beaten and gasping for a breath that will never, ever come again.

Could you ask for anything more?

Wormhole Books can be found online at www.wormholebooks.com.

Weston is the co-author of Appalachian Galapagos and Scary Rednecks both due out from Medium Rare Books in hardback in the Spring of 2003. He promises that no needless eviscerations were conducted during the research of this review. Try him at www.westonochse.com