With opening paragraphs as gripping as the most shameless yellow journalism, Tom Paine's Scar Vegas — out this month in paperback — spreads 10 new urban legends, mostly of his own invention.
They're masquerading as slices of fast-paced short stories that don't let up until the final sentence, when both reader and protagonist can stop, shake their heads and figure out what just hit them.
People like Melanie Applebee populate the book — the kind of insufferable Young Urban Professional that made it easy to spawn the yuppie nickname.
She finds herself suddenly laid off from her high-profile job and nearly penniless. When she heads west in search of work, she's kicked off a train in El Paso, business suit and all, because she can't pay the fare.
At a defining moment, she sadly reaches up to finger her missing pearl necklace, like a war veteran grasping at an amputated leg. It turns out Melanie has just sold it for $75 cash to a border-hopping rascal who assures her he can help get her back on the road to success.
Like Applebee, Paine's characters have just sold their last link to reality or undone their final stitch of sanity. They've become unclasped or unhinged. They're bobbing unmoored at sea. Some fly headlong into their personal squalls; others are, in the words of one of the book's reluctant heroes, "pretty much like looking for something to happen." All are struggling to survive.
In "General Markman's Last Stand," a respected Marine Corps officer reveals his passion for silky lingerie — not the way it looks on his wife, but how it feels on himself.
An Ivy-leaguer is rescued from his storm-wrecked sailboat by Haitian refugees adrift on their own overcrowded, ill-fated raft in "Will You Say Something, Monsieur Eliot?"
Paine also takes a stab at modernizing the Heart of Darkness fable. This time, it's a barstool yarn about the horrors of exotic hotel construction in deepest, darkest Bali.
The breakneck storytelling that distinguishes this first collection nearly masks the political commentary Paine weaves into the stories. The 10 pieces include numerous references to pop culture and current events, which at times breed laugh-out-loud humor or produce a shrewdly exposed moral. Rarely does this sermonizing get in the way of Paine's captivating prose.
Some of the most hilarious moments appear in a satire with a rather procedural title. "Unapproved Minutes of the Carthage, Vermont, Zoning Board of Adjustment (As recorded by Town Secretary Betty Bradley)" plays upon a small town's fears of a cancer-spreading waves from a communications tower put up by radio station WIKD.
And the title story, "Scar Vegas," even includes a plot twist pulled almost exactly from a phony e-mail message forwarded heavily a few years ago. Remember reading how lucrative selling human kidneys on the black market is supposed to be? Tom Paine does.
One final cautionary remark: Be careful not to read this slim volume all in one sitting; it's downright addicting.
