Of the 70 plus pieces included in this collection, the most cohesive in terms of beginning, middle, and end is “who’s sid vicious?” a story about men who once played in bands and dated girls named “Feathers.” Now, these same men have found work at the Post Office, and live with women who have never heard of the former Sex Pistols bassist, finding in this a kind of numbed, but suspicious, contentment. Some of the pieces are five pages long; others top out at three lines.
Neither prose nor poetry, exactly, EPIC SLOTH is one of those books the reader should simply relax and experience. In essence, reading EPIC SLOTH is like listening to echoes of Bukowski as remixed by the Cartoon Network. Once the preconception of any kind of overarching narrative or “story” is removed, aside from the story of characters who have no story, the reader will undoubtedly laugh out loud at least once during each piece. There is the vignette concerning the writer hired to create a screenplay for the producer of such movies as “The Sensual Touch of Sherlock Holmes, Part V” or the story of the librarian who becomes visibly nervous when asked to search for the title, “Confused, Anxious, and Angry: One Man’s Downward Spiral into an Anonymous Abyss.”
Philip Gaber’s talent for observation and hilarity is obvious; to reach a wider audience, he will need to write longer, more structurally coherent pieces. However, for those who enjoy wordplay, black humor, and the chronicles of aimlessness, this book is heaven-sent.
Reviewed by Julia Lai for IndieReader.