Will Not Attend is a little like getting invited to dinner with Adam Resnick. He has the seat of honor at the head of the table, and he’s got a crazy leer on his face, like he’s about to do something unspeakable to the mashed potatoes or the roast chicken.

So you take your seat, with a little apprehension, because you’re not so sure you’re going to like what he does with those mashed potatoes, that crazy grin. You notice the restraints on the chair you’re about to sit in.

“Don’t worry,” says the maitre’d, “those aren’t for you.” But that’s exactly the sort of thing that makes you worry more.

As you sit and the maitre’d sinks back into the shadows you notice that Mr. Mesnick actually has two heads… No, good God, three! It’s like you’ve been let into a freak show tent where they serve dinner. Each one had a different, maniacal grin. One, the younger one, has a frightened rabbit of a grin, likely from living in and amongst a slew of brothers and a steamroller of a trip of a dad. The second has a more innocent smile, though you get the sense that that second head is thinking about, at first, what items from the back of a comic book he was going to send away for and how he’d organize them on his bureau when they arrived, but then started to think of girls and sex and all the rest. The third is an older, more hardened grin as if it’s just eaten a mouthful of tacks by accident but, by God, it’s going to muscle through and eat them and seem to enjoy it, damnit.

The second head begins speaking first, telling you some story about an Easter egg hunt and a conspiracy between two young kids, a girl and a boy… and you begin to get where it all went off the rails for this head. The first head interrupts the second, and then the third starts, as if just awakened, and soon they’re all going, each telling a different story, sometimes overlapping, oftentimes not.

But you’re not tied into the chair, and the maitre’d, or someone, keeps bringing another glass of wine, or beer, or sparkling flavored water, so you stick around. You haven’t opened your mouth since you arrived, your tweed jacket with the professorial patches on the elbows still on, something the maitre’d forgot to take from you.

Despite his neurotic, somewhat abrasive personality, you like this guy, you like his stories. He tells them with humor, self-deprecating at most times. He’s got them down to a science, by now, so that they flow naturally, and even the multitude of heads talking over the course of the evening doesn’t seem odd or awkward, just a natural, rambling flow. You get the sense that, were you to sit down next to this guy in a bar, this guy with three heads, that he’d be a miserable bastard, sitting on his own, in silence, looking out at everyone in the bar through hooded eyelids, maybe grumbling obscenities to himself, clutching his plastic bag from The Strand. But this special performance, here at his table, is where he shines, where he feels most comfortable and, warts and all, he’s pretty damn entertaining.

I got this book through Penguin’s First to Read program (http://www.firsttoread.com). While I enjoyed the book, I didn’t quite enjoy the ebook reader I had to use (Bluefire Reader on my iPad — hence the tweed jacket with the elbow patches, eh? Look at me, all fancy with an iPad. ). Whether it was a limitation of the app or because of a limitation the publisher set on the content I couldn’t take notes, notes which would have made this review at least 14% more amazing. The app also crashed on me a few times and forgot my bookmark when I came back to reading. So Bluefire, 1 star, this book, 4 stars.

I got this book as an ebook. I saw some chumps, sitting there in a cafe, attempting to read books in actual book form and I scoffed to my slightly grubby self. I’d been hunting in the outback for days for this book, cobbling together the contents from purloined internet signals while I was driving the Outback Google Maps Street View car. Chapter twelve got stuck in my dreadlocks, which had formed from all the dust and filth accumulated whilst driving around, trying to hold the street view camera and WiFi signal stealer in place.

I was being authentic, man. If I was going to read a book I was going to make sure I was a reader, not just a letter recognizer, like most of the chumps out there. But once I had my ebook I was just, like, sitting in a car, driving around the outback, careening around the odd kangaroo, sacred stone, drop bear. I was unsatisfied. I felt like a ritzy reading magazine version of a reader. Well that’s not what I’m all about.

So I took the ebook on a plane. Not just on a plane, like on the inside, like a lot of chumps, but I taped the iPad with the ebook on it to the outside of the plane. Picked it off again in Egypt, where I struck out for the desert. Four days in I sat down with my iPad to read the book. But I’d been playing Angry Turtles while I was walking to get well and truly lost, so my battery had run dead. So I walked back to civilization, recharged my batteries. Then I headed back out into the wilderness. This time I played less Angry Turtles and more ASCII Art Ninjas, which is way easier on the battery.

I wound up in the White Desert, and, after a bit of a struggle, got myself perched on top of one of the white rock pillars, where I could idly throw stones at passing camel caravans and read my book, like a real reader. So I did. But then, after getting through chapter one, then chapter two I began to think I was reading it all wrong. I mean, *any*one can read a book from start to finish. But to really read something I would have to strike out into the woolier passages without a guide, without any idea where I really was. I started just reading every other letter on a few pages, then jumped to a random page, read the third and seventieth letter on the page. But I wanted more. So I began reading with my eyes closed for an even more authentic experience. I achieved such an amazing reading of this book that I probably levitated. I couldn’t tell because I had my eyes shut, but I’m pretty sure I had. Oh, I also met a Danish girl and a Latvian skinny tall guy who plays the guitar and sings opera for a lark floating on nearby stone pillars, which was cool. Ha HA! Andorrrrrrra!

The endnotes in the ebook version were interesting, in that you expected just yet more navel-gazing, and so weren’t disappointed or looking for much more. And a few of the notes provided some small insight into a travel writer’s process and the business. But the main articles, all stuck in one concentrated, Rolf-y blob, were a bit too much to stomach. I suppose it’s the danger of travel writing — you tend to travel with yourself, and some part of you becomes the story, because you’re telling about your travels in your voice. I don’t know if I just didn’t get on with Rolf or what, I didn’t enjoy his projects, his desperate need to be more than tourist. I’ve enjoyed plenty of travelogues, from Bill Bryson to Douglas Adams to Laurence Sterne. Just not this one.

I’m conflicted. This is a book that was recommended to me at the same time, in the same breath, as Joe Lansdale’s “The Bottoms,” which I loved. Andrew is cut from the same cloth, hell, Joe often calls Andrew Vachss his brother. And Burke seems like a great character… a hard-boiled, troubled yet brilliant private investigator with a strong moral compass. I just, I don’t know what fell flat for me.

Maybe I had built the book up too much in my own mind, as it sat on my nightstand, waiting for its turn up, the designated heavy hitter to be brought in when I wanted a sure thing. I found Burke interesting, Flood and her quest a great story-driver, but I found myself getting really frustrated with the book. I thought that the book got stuck in these little eddies again and again that it really needn’t have. I had to keep reminding myself that I was reading a book whose formula has been copied to death since it came out in 1985, but that was part of the frustration for me, I never felt like I wasn’t reading a book, I didn’t ever get lost in the story for too long a stretch.

It reminded me a lot of Ken Bruen, and not in a good way. He has the same way of having the protagonist preach at you a little bit, it’s just a little bit too self aware for my tastes.

I think I’ll give Vachss another shot, after this one, but I’m hoping to get lost in a Burke adventure, instead of being constantly shaken out of it like with this one.

First, the good stuff, because Kevin Barry is full of good stuff. He’s at his best when his stories veer that little bit off the road into the bizarre and the slightly unexpected. He’s able to capture off-the-wall, perhaps manic voices with believability and aplomb. Which is what he does so well in “Fjord of Killary,” “Wifey Redux,” “Beer Trip of Llandudno,” and “Doctor Sot.”

“Fjords of Killary” is a brilliant story, but you probably knew that because it’s been in the New Yorker and thrown around willy nilly amongst good company.

“Wifey Redux” is a great story in a great voice — a man has a happy marriage, he tells you, and he has a lovely teenage daughter, and she, in turn, has a… boyfriend. And it all goes downhill from there.

“Beer Trip to Llandudno” is a fun story about a traveling beer group who all have some interesting issues and head out to Wales for a bit of serious drinking. It’s an interesting, short sketch of some diverse characters.

“Doctor Sot” tells the story of a doctor who’s taken to the booze pretty seriously and whose practice has been leaking patients while his wife sits at home, happily absent from his crumbling world. A beautiful traveler in town gives him renewed purpose, though, and off he goes on an outreach.

Most of the others, for me, are missing Barry’s unique voice, or, in one case, his voice seems to fall a bit flat. “Ernestine and Kit’” is the kind of wacky premise that you think Barry would knock out of the park — two older ladies run around kidnapping children. But there seems to be a lot of passive voice in the story, which is what makes it lie flat for me. “Across the Rooftops” is a boring, perhaps intentionally so, tale of a failed first coupling. It’s more of a fine(isn) scene than a fully realized short story. “Wistful England” is in the same vein, but is a better story. The narrator seems more like the adolescent (mentally, anyway, which we men can hold on to for far longer than a purely biological definition of adolescence) in “Across the Rooftops,” but more developed. Less of a passive observer of a scene that he should be engaged in.

There are the rough and ready collection: “The Girls and the Dogs” and “White Hitachi” and possibly “The Mainland Campaign,” too, where the narrators are kids on the fringe of society. They were fine stories, “The Mainland Campaign” the weakest of the lot, because the characters felt the most wooden, written from caricatures rather than given a bit of life, but they didn’t sparkle in the way Barry is capable of writing. “Berlin Arkonaplatz – My Lesbian Summer” is a similar story, in terms of narrator and fringes, but it feels like an adolescent story, like Rooftops and Wisftul.

The title story is okay, as well. The writing is fine, it’s just that the tension never really built for me, and I found myself looking for the next story, flicking ahead past a lot of internal strain and strife. “A Cruelty” feels similar to “Dark Lies the Island” because I got the sense that I’d read the story before. It’s a tale of a kid with an OCD/autistic-like mien who goes on a trip with studied regularity in all aspects. Well, one day there’s an obstacle to his happy routine. The End.

I think I was particularly rough in judgement on this collection because Kevin Barry’s first collection, “There are Little Kingdoms” is an amazing collection and his novel “City of Bohane” just blew me away. One of my favorite all-time novels. Overall it’s not a bad read, but I did find myself wishing for the next story to start on a number of occasions.

This, as the entire world before me had discovered, is a beautiful book. It took me a little while to get into it — waiting for some flaw somewhere, however little, that justified why it took me so long to read this book.

And I found the odd word choice here, there. But then even those disappeared and I got sucked into the story.

I think there is some portion of my brain that connected the (horrible) experience of reading The House of Sand and Fog with this book, and so I stayed away. I’m not saying that’s a rational connection, it was just there.

Hosseini does such a great job of narrating this story and stepping out of the way, not beating you over the head with the emotions you’re meant to be feeling, and he builds suspense especially well towards the end of the book (the scene in which you think, “Hmm, that’s odd he mentioned tha… oh God, that’s going to come back pretty soon in a nasty way, isn’t it?” got me hooked).

Now, if only this book could reach a wider readership…

I was on a real Colin Bateman kick when I was younger… in the late nineties and early two-thousands. I blazed through Divorcing Jack, which was a revelation: I loved the narrative voice and the wild plot. Every time I entered a book store I would check first the ‘A’ section of the fiction shelves, and then proceed to the ‘B’ section for a new book by Mr. Bateman.

And Colin’s recent resurgence on Kickstarter and Facebook got me back into his work, which I’d left, for whatever reason (maybe he simply stopped churning out books at a pace that kept up with my book store visits). I enjoyed his re-launched collection of short stories, Dublin Express, and, on the back of it, bought the audiobook of Fire and Brimstone, his latest book not financed by Kickstarter.

And there it was, suddenly, Dan Starkey, like some old buddy, back in the saddle. The voice was the same, after all he’d been through (near divorce, infidelity, by both himself and Trish, the death of their son, numerous beatings) and off he dove into a fresh adventure.

Almost immediately I was glad I’d given Dan a break for a number of years before tackling this book, I don’t know that I could read them all back-to-back, because Dan is, intentionally, I believe, a pretty unsympathetic character. By the time I’d gotten halfway through I thought the plot was interesting enough, but an unease with the whole book began to settle over me. By the time he runs into his third (or so) bad guy I clocked it: the book feels like one long, drawn-out bad guy monologue. From Harry Frank, the drug dealer, from a high figure in a new cult on the streets of Belfast, from Trish, from Dan, himself, from the leader of the Botanic Boat Crew. They all take the stage, proclaim to the audience how they’re going to do what they’re going to do or why they’re going to do it, and then exeunt, stage left. Except for Dan, who sticks around to chuck witty little quips in everyone’s direction. More than anything else in the book, the tendency of the characters to wibble on a bit grated the most.

The action gets a little predictable, and if you’ve read any other Dan Starkey books you can probably guess the outcome and resolution to a few of the mysteries. But it’s familiar turf to Bateman’s readers, with Belfast getting a little drug and gang makeover, in lieu of sectarian violence, which is entertaining enough.