Head Full of Traffic

Head Full of Traffic
Brian Ames
2004, Pocol Press
ISBN 1-929763-01-8

Brian Ames is one of The Harrow’s contributers, and his story "Traffic" on The Harrow is reprinted as the title work of this 24-story collection, Head Full of Traffic.
Ames, writing from St. Charles County, Missouri, writes sneering, kick-in-the-teeth horror with a working-class edge. This book’s short opening song, “John Lee Hooker undead,” riffs on Hooker’s best-known work and just cries out to be recorded by a filk artist. It’s a good bluesy introduction to the eclectic collection that follows.

“Carnival” takes that perennial horror favorite, the freak show, and gives it a gritty sense of reality that will make the reader twitch as the disgusting carny Weeb takes a walk through the freak tent and is plunged into terrifying visions of mistakes past. Similarly bizarre is “Grandpa’s Orchard,” a lush nightmare of one old man’s strange crop growing across a government-guarded border. Both stories offer juicy prose and images that will linger in your memory for quite some time.

The protagonists of most of Ames’ stories are, for the most part, ordinary people struggling to get by in a world where the odds seemed stacked against them. For example, in “Head Full of Traffic,” the title story, an overheated road crew worker slips into madness, while the coal miner in “[circle]” is slowly realizing the unpleasant truth about the small lump in the back of his head and the put-upon office drone in “Maurice the Bastard” is trapped in corporate hell. Other protagonists include ice-cream men, hunters, soldiers, journalists, truckers, and PR workers. Ames captures their voices well, and thrusts each into his own personal nightmare.

Ames isn’t a one-note writer, though. Although his dominant authorial voice resonates with the bitterness of an underpaid, overworked laborer, several of the stories in this collection have a delicate, hallucinatory feel to them. For example, the surreal “The Geomancer,” in which a feng shui specialist tries to cleanse the narrator’s cluttered mind, feels like a dream remembered upon awakening, and “A Widow's Tale” is a warm Greco-Judaic fairy tale. “You are not a Fisherman” retains Ames’ blue-collar themes but has a thoughtful, almost dreamy narrative style, and “The Hummock King,” one of the two stories featuring a female narrator, is a dark, Grimm-like fantasy of bones, sex, and wild animals. Finally, “Lamentations of the Gods,” a tribal story of holy war, edges Ames into science fiction territory.

Head Full of Traffic is a wide-ranging collection that showcases Ames’ flexibility and talent. It’s an excellent introduction to a writer who’s carving out a distinct niche for himself in the horror industry.

The Harrow's Copyright Information and Disclaimer.