The stories of Ted Olinger’s THE WOODPECKER MENACE all take place on the Key Peninsula in Puget Sound, and they all seem to even have the same narrator and many of the same characters, but what does tend to vary between stories is the mood, from the very lighthearted satire of “The Good Sport” and “Into the Brainforest,” to the more serious meditation of “King Tide.” Many stories, however, hover in between, in some odd gray area that seems, impossible as it may sound, simultaneous very light and very heavy and morose. In its ambivalent mix of humor and gloominess, and moreover in its staunch regionalism, comparisons to Garrison Keillor are not entirely inaccurate, though the stories in THE WOODPECKER MENACE tend to not resolve nearly as much as a Lake Wobegon monologue, with far more left unsaid than said. There’s a lot beneath the surface here, such as the narrator’s unresolved ethical quandaries in the title story, or his grief over the dementia and death of his mother in “King Tide.”
The biggest problems in Olinger’s THE WOODPECKER MENACE tend to be when he strays from this subtlety. The New-Agey, Earth-Mother-type gardener in “Part of Nature” is just too silly to be believable, and that makes the last act of the story, an attempt to reveal a more human dimension in the character, sort of fall flat. Still, the stories are often well-written, full of moodiness and little dashes of wit. The comparison of the sound of a woodpecker to “all the jackhammers in hell destroying the Devil’s driveway,” or the comparison of public schools to fish hatcheries because, “Both share the design of interconnected structures, in which the fry, whether fish or human, are moved to larger and larger pools of water and talent” are among the many examples of fine comedic imagery.
Whether it’s being light, or dark and moody, or both, THE WOODPECKER MENACE is a fairly well-written collection, able to take itself seriously and also able not to.
Reviewed by Chaz Baker for IndieReader.