Quill & Quire is Canada's Magazine of Book News and Reviews.
"Jerry Levy is also making a short-fiction debut this fall. Urban Legend is a collection of gritty urban stories about characters from different classes struggling to cope when they find themselves pushed out of their respective comfort zones."
"Jerry Levy is also making a short-fiction debut this fall. Urban Legend is a collection of gritty urban stories about characters from different classes struggling to cope when they find themselves pushed out of their respective comfort zones."
From the mythos of Dianne Lalonde:
In many legends past, we learn of the various misfortunes inflicted by the ever-vigilant and preying monsters, just waiting for a lapse in character or wrong location. Consider The Loup Garou, The Irreligious Prey of the Devil. These stories are passed along as a guide – don’t do that, live carefully, and you’ll be safe.
Jerry Levy’s urban legends do not just tell of how scary the external world is, but of how scary you can be to yourself. The pain, confusion, and stress endured daily in attempting to navigate this world while judging, pressuring, and at times defeating yourself. Levy draws attention to the ill-examined and scariest monster, the self.
In many legends past, we learn of the various misfortunes inflicted by the ever-vigilant and preying monsters, just waiting for a lapse in character or wrong location. Consider The Loup Garou, The Irreligious Prey of the Devil. These stories are passed along as a guide – don’t do that, live carefully, and you’ll be safe.
Jerry Levy’s urban legends do not just tell of how scary the external world is, but of how scary you can be to yourself. The pain, confusion, and stress endured daily in attempting to navigate this world while judging, pressuring, and at times defeating yourself. Levy draws attention to the ill-examined and scariest monster, the self.
Carole Giangrande is the author of An Ordinary Star and A Forest Burning and the short story collection Missing Persons.
When a new work of fiction’s described as “gritty,” I’m on alert for a pseudo-streetwise collection loaded down with drugs, despair, bad sex, etc. etc. Been there, done that, says my Good Reading gene and I move on. But don’t make that mistake, dear reader, with Jerry Levy’s debut collection of stories, Urban Legend. Gritty it may be, with an assortment of aggrieved and even demented characters, but Levy’s wit and his assured, confident voice allow the reader breathing space and even a chuckle or two in the company of messed-up people. As the book’s title might indicate, the structure of these stories owes much to the telling of folk tales, often setting up what feels like an archetypal legend spiked with a wry, contemporary twist. In “The Golem of New York,” a man who suffers the death of his fiancée begs a rabbi to bring her back to life in the form of a mythic figure made of mud and clay — a golem who, in Jewish lore, comes to assist communities in times of crisis. The rabbi obliges, but the golem’s “assistance” both backfires and heals.
The title story involves an elusive young woman who suspects she might one day become an urban legend, a bank robber with “no marketable skills” who displays, among other things, the author’s gift for snappy opening sentences. “The way I’ve always done it is to insert three Valiums into balled-up hamburger meat,” says the female narrator who, like many of Levy’s characters, is under-(or un-) employed, bookish and angry at society’s indifference. Thank God for her droll sense of humour. “There are pros and cons to robbing banks for a living,” she says. “It’s easy money. I mean, it’s not like working nine-to-five. The hourly rate is quite good.”
Folklore takes a literary turn in “Margellons,” the story of a poverty-stricken writer (critiqued as a highly derivative one) who takes a bizarre job which not only makes him ill but pushes him over the edge, turning him into a cheesy copycat of a brilliantly realized Dostoyesvky character. And In “Stolen Words,” a man asked to claim the effects of a woman he met in group therapy uncovers a stash of first-rate unpublished fiction. Publishing the stories under his own name, he achieves easy fame — a vicarious thrill for any writer reading this tale. Read it and find out what happens.
There’s an underlying fatalism in these stories. They inform us that our world doesn’t treat its young well. Sisyphus rolls the rock up the hill, only to see it slide down again. Life hasn’t much to offer these bright kids, all of whom are endowed with a profound sense of the ridiculous. If a character must grow and change (as writing workshops tell us) then why not change for the worse?
In “The Anarchist,” a young woman from a comfortable but unhappy family background gets caught up in the G20 riots that rocked Toronto in 2010. Later she comes upon an injured animal which she can’t identify. She nurses it back to health and returns it to the wild, but when it doesn’t survive, neither does the gentle world she’s begun to experience. There’s a direct parallel to this story in “Phoenix Rising,” in which a woman about to jump off a bridge spots an injured cat on the highway below and rescues it, becoming a local celebrity. Her luck changes; her sculpting career gets a boost, she makes friends, and a carpenter offers free repairs on the ceiling beams she pulled down in a failed attempt to hang herself. While the cat’s fate loads the ending with grim irony, the scene when the woman wrecks the ceiling in her hapless suicide attempt is a true gem of black humour.
If there’s a problem with this book, it’s one shared by many first story collections that follow through on a theme (including my own Missing Persons). Jerry Levy is writing, albeit in a quirky and imaginative way, about varieties of loss and after a while, it’s almost inevitable that elements of repetition would enter the stories. In Levy’s case, almost all of the characters are middle-class, well-educated, often aspiring artists, all on society’s edges. The writing is assured and clear, and the characters are, for the most part, sympathetic, but it’s not always easy to distinguish one individual voice from the next.
Yet his material is also the stuff of legend, where it’s OK (up to a point) to generalize, to create character types and to draw conclusions about human nature. Levy is currently at work on a novel. I’m looking forward to more of his quirky voice, his uncommon hybrid of old-fashioned mythmaking and postmodern irony.
When a new work of fiction’s described as “gritty,” I’m on alert for a pseudo-streetwise collection loaded down with drugs, despair, bad sex, etc. etc. Been there, done that, says my Good Reading gene and I move on. But don’t make that mistake, dear reader, with Jerry Levy’s debut collection of stories, Urban Legend. Gritty it may be, with an assortment of aggrieved and even demented characters, but Levy’s wit and his assured, confident voice allow the reader breathing space and even a chuckle or two in the company of messed-up people. As the book’s title might indicate, the structure of these stories owes much to the telling of folk tales, often setting up what feels like an archetypal legend spiked with a wry, contemporary twist. In “The Golem of New York,” a man who suffers the death of his fiancée begs a rabbi to bring her back to life in the form of a mythic figure made of mud and clay — a golem who, in Jewish lore, comes to assist communities in times of crisis. The rabbi obliges, but the golem’s “assistance” both backfires and heals.
The title story involves an elusive young woman who suspects she might one day become an urban legend, a bank robber with “no marketable skills” who displays, among other things, the author’s gift for snappy opening sentences. “The way I’ve always done it is to insert three Valiums into balled-up hamburger meat,” says the female narrator who, like many of Levy’s characters, is under-(or un-) employed, bookish and angry at society’s indifference. Thank God for her droll sense of humour. “There are pros and cons to robbing banks for a living,” she says. “It’s easy money. I mean, it’s not like working nine-to-five. The hourly rate is quite good.”
Folklore takes a literary turn in “Margellons,” the story of a poverty-stricken writer (critiqued as a highly derivative one) who takes a bizarre job which not only makes him ill but pushes him over the edge, turning him into a cheesy copycat of a brilliantly realized Dostoyesvky character. And In “Stolen Words,” a man asked to claim the effects of a woman he met in group therapy uncovers a stash of first-rate unpublished fiction. Publishing the stories under his own name, he achieves easy fame — a vicarious thrill for any writer reading this tale. Read it and find out what happens.
There’s an underlying fatalism in these stories. They inform us that our world doesn’t treat its young well. Sisyphus rolls the rock up the hill, only to see it slide down again. Life hasn’t much to offer these bright kids, all of whom are endowed with a profound sense of the ridiculous. If a character must grow and change (as writing workshops tell us) then why not change for the worse?
In “The Anarchist,” a young woman from a comfortable but unhappy family background gets caught up in the G20 riots that rocked Toronto in 2010. Later she comes upon an injured animal which she can’t identify. She nurses it back to health and returns it to the wild, but when it doesn’t survive, neither does the gentle world she’s begun to experience. There’s a direct parallel to this story in “Phoenix Rising,” in which a woman about to jump off a bridge spots an injured cat on the highway below and rescues it, becoming a local celebrity. Her luck changes; her sculpting career gets a boost, she makes friends, and a carpenter offers free repairs on the ceiling beams she pulled down in a failed attempt to hang herself. While the cat’s fate loads the ending with grim irony, the scene when the woman wrecks the ceiling in her hapless suicide attempt is a true gem of black humour.
If there’s a problem with this book, it’s one shared by many first story collections that follow through on a theme (including my own Missing Persons). Jerry Levy is writing, albeit in a quirky and imaginative way, about varieties of loss and after a while, it’s almost inevitable that elements of repetition would enter the stories. In Levy’s case, almost all of the characters are middle-class, well-educated, often aspiring artists, all on society’s edges. The writing is assured and clear, and the characters are, for the most part, sympathetic, but it’s not always easy to distinguish one individual voice from the next.
Yet his material is also the stuff of legend, where it’s OK (up to a point) to generalize, to create character types and to draw conclusions about human nature. Levy is currently at work on a novel. I’m looking forward to more of his quirky voice, his uncommon hybrid of old-fashioned mythmaking and postmodern irony.
Jon Muldoon is editor at Beach Metro News.
_The characters in Jerry Levy’s stories are most definitely not what one would call heroes. Some are sad, others corrupt; some are downright unlikeable. What they all have in common though, is familiarity, the sense that under the right circumstances, those characters are very much like people in our own lives, who might react to trying situations in the same unpredictable ways.
Urban Legend is Levy’s first published work, a collection of 14 short stories, covering everything from a sad husband running away to Paris (Paris is a Woman) to a sham artist getting taken by a scam artist (The Scarf).
Some stories veer into the fantastical, such as the tale where three witch-like sisters hire a stranger to imitate the symptoms of their skin disease in order to find a cure from a believing doctor (Morgellons, based on a real condition in which a person believes they are being attacked by some sort of parasite, while doctors usually diagnose the patient with delusions and known skin disorders).
Another tale features a grieving widower who reconstructs his deceased wife from mud with the help of a fringe Rabbi (The Golem of New York City).
Even the likable characters who appear from time to time, such as the disfigured young man who finds a temporary adoptive family in a group of tree planters (The Ugly Man), tend to meet with unfortunate circumstances.
That’s not to say Levy’s characters should be avoided; quite the contrary, these well-written tales will appeal to fans of speculative fiction as well as anyone who appreciates darkly comic fiction.
_The characters in Jerry Levy’s stories are most definitely not what one would call heroes. Some are sad, others corrupt; some are downright unlikeable. What they all have in common though, is familiarity, the sense that under the right circumstances, those characters are very much like people in our own lives, who might react to trying situations in the same unpredictable ways.
Urban Legend is Levy’s first published work, a collection of 14 short stories, covering everything from a sad husband running away to Paris (Paris is a Woman) to a sham artist getting taken by a scam artist (The Scarf).
Some stories veer into the fantastical, such as the tale where three witch-like sisters hire a stranger to imitate the symptoms of their skin disease in order to find a cure from a believing doctor (Morgellons, based on a real condition in which a person believes they are being attacked by some sort of parasite, while doctors usually diagnose the patient with delusions and known skin disorders).
Another tale features a grieving widower who reconstructs his deceased wife from mud with the help of a fringe Rabbi (The Golem of New York City).
Even the likable characters who appear from time to time, such as the disfigured young man who finds a temporary adoptive family in a group of tree planters (The Ugly Man), tend to meet with unfortunate circumstances.
That’s not to say Levy’s characters should be avoided; quite the contrary, these well-written tales will appeal to fans of speculative fiction as well as anyone who appreciates darkly comic fiction.
Elle Pryor is the editor of The Sim Review.
"Jerry Levy's short story 'Paris is a Woman' is from his forthcoming short story collection, 'Urban Legend'. It is available to buy on Amazon from September 31st and is published by Thistledown Press. I've been lucky enough to read a copy of the book before the publication date and can thoroughly recommend it. All of the short stories have something new to offer. Jerry's love of art and literature shined through in many of the stories. It's like being in some kind of hybrid art gallery/bookstore at times.
A sculptor writes her own obituary before she commits suicide, an out of work graduate goes slowly mad after failing an audition for The Wizard of Oz, a desperate writer agrees to find a cure for three women with a strange disease and a man is surprised after he is contacted by the landlady of a dead woman that he recently met at group therapy. There are many other equally compelling stories in the collection, each of them written in Levy's effortless style. You'll probably finish this book in one sitting and still want more at the end."
"Jerry Levy's short story 'Paris is a Woman' is from his forthcoming short story collection, 'Urban Legend'. It is available to buy on Amazon from September 31st and is published by Thistledown Press. I've been lucky enough to read a copy of the book before the publication date and can thoroughly recommend it. All of the short stories have something new to offer. Jerry's love of art and literature shined through in many of the stories. It's like being in some kind of hybrid art gallery/bookstore at times.
A sculptor writes her own obituary before she commits suicide, an out of work graduate goes slowly mad after failing an audition for The Wizard of Oz, a desperate writer agrees to find a cure for three women with a strange disease and a man is surprised after he is contacted by the landlady of a dead woman that he recently met at group therapy. There are many other equally compelling stories in the collection, each of them written in Levy's effortless style. You'll probably finish this book in one sitting and still want more at the end."
Ann Ireland is the author of A Certain Mr. Takahashi, The Instructor, Exile, The Blue Guitar.
" In their off-kilter quest for money, love or fame, Levy's misfit narrators plunge into dark situations of their own making. Bleakly comic, these tales engage as well as provoke."
" In their off-kilter quest for money, love or fame, Levy's misfit narrators plunge into dark situations of their own making. Bleakly comic, these tales engage as well as provoke."
Barbara Lambert is the author of The Allegra Series, A Message for Mr. Lazarus, and The Whirling Girl.
"These eccentrically compelling stories pull the reader deep into the rivers of the unconscious where, for Levy’s characters, the impossible is likely to submerge the mundane, often with drastic results – the stuff of urban legend, indeed."
"These eccentrically compelling stories pull the reader deep into the rivers of the unconscious where, for Levy’s characters, the impossible is likely to submerge the mundane, often with drastic results – the stuff of urban legend, indeed."
Joan L. Cannon is the author of Maiden Run, Settling, Peripheral Vision.
“Urban Legend might be better titled in the plural. This collection of stories by Jerry Levy definitely deserves to have “legend” as part of its description. Levy isn’t just a smooth writer, he’s definitely a storyteller, and there is a difference. Not only is the “voice” consistent no matter whom the narrator may be in a particular tale, but so is the humor and wry views of the author.
Levy gives psychology its vivid due by daring: he lets myth and imagination have equal weight with the everyday protagonists. These characters seem to be universally one step behind their acquaintances, and just beyond some symbolic pale. The stories reveal the plight of outsiders to readers in a way that makes them feel part of the inner circle. Levy infuses them all with his empathy. Descriptions of jobs ring so true that a reader wonders how many Levy has performed himself. Authenticity and fable go hand-in-hand. This pleases one who isn’t, as a rule, a fan of fantasy.
The title story is representative of the group in that it comes full circle. Most of the characters find themselves trapped, or at least incapable of reorienting themselves. The interesting question is, why? Yes, of course, it is because they are who they are, but there’s always a tacit suggestion that they could have won out with more imagination, more strength, or just with some kind of encouragement. Perhaps it’s sobering to observe such...pessimism...cynicism? But it can’t be all gloom to a man who can make you laugh while he’s tugging your heart strings, and I never saw a more apt neologism than “disorchestrated.” Bravo!
Urban Legend is a series with a genuinely fresh treatments of the wonderful short story form.”
“Urban Legend might be better titled in the plural. This collection of stories by Jerry Levy definitely deserves to have “legend” as part of its description. Levy isn’t just a smooth writer, he’s definitely a storyteller, and there is a difference. Not only is the “voice” consistent no matter whom the narrator may be in a particular tale, but so is the humor and wry views of the author.
Levy gives psychology its vivid due by daring: he lets myth and imagination have equal weight with the everyday protagonists. These characters seem to be universally one step behind their acquaintances, and just beyond some symbolic pale. The stories reveal the plight of outsiders to readers in a way that makes them feel part of the inner circle. Levy infuses them all with his empathy. Descriptions of jobs ring so true that a reader wonders how many Levy has performed himself. Authenticity and fable go hand-in-hand. This pleases one who isn’t, as a rule, a fan of fantasy.
The title story is representative of the group in that it comes full circle. Most of the characters find themselves trapped, or at least incapable of reorienting themselves. The interesting question is, why? Yes, of course, it is because they are who they are, but there’s always a tacit suggestion that they could have won out with more imagination, more strength, or just with some kind of encouragement. Perhaps it’s sobering to observe such...pessimism...cynicism? But it can’t be all gloom to a man who can make you laugh while he’s tugging your heart strings, and I never saw a more apt neologism than “disorchestrated.” Bravo!
Urban Legend is a series with a genuinely fresh treatments of the wonderful short story form.”