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I tend not to read for fun anymore. The reason I don't read for fun is circumstance, the work I do precludes it: editor of an emag, web designer where I have to read and write copy, desktop publisher (ditto). You see, when one is surrounded by it (words), reading for pleasure (sometimes) becomes a bit of a chore, no matter how exquisite the prose. I needed something to save me. And now I am excited. Brian Ames's new book of short stories, Eighty-Sixed, has reminded me of how wonderful reading is. Simple as that. I took his book with me on the bus every day for a week or so, just to pass the time instead of having to talk to the Mrs O'Seventies of this world about the weather... and their racist talk of 'foreigners' threatening to steal off with their grandaughters' maidenheads. Eighty-Sixed took me away to the place all readers love, that Nirvana where the present just shimmers away to make way for the imagination. I'd read a story, then start another. I even confess to going beyond my stop just so I'd find out what happened to his chocolate box assortment of characters that worship baseball, succeed in life except when it comes to tree felling, obsess about dead rock stars, and organise hits on their cheating autumn years hunting husbands. Someone once said that a writer will continue to tell the same story over and over again, just changing characters' names and a setting or two. This is not the case with Brian Ames. The proof is Eighty-Sixed, which embraces variety and always keeps the reader guessing and entralled (at least he did me). This is one book you'll never lend out.
— Matthew Ward, editor of SKIVE
— Alex Kuo, author of
Lipstick
and Other Stories
These stories rank with the most profound hunting stories I've read since "The Bear" section of William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. Like Faulkner, Ames sees hunting at its best as embodying a vital relationship between man, animal, and the deepest spirit of what wild land is left to us.
— Wayne Ude, author of Becoming Coyote
Attention literati—the search is over! You want a legitimate American voice in fiction? Brian Ames has arrived. Cerebral, classic narrative? Superbly mournful characterizations? Wild-ass rock and roll in actual text form? Playful plots with just a touch of painfully, compassionately offered cruelty? You want poetry, you want hard rock, you want red-neck and knee jerk, you want sweet kindness and compassion, love and hate, all deftly portrayed, sometimes in gritty black and white, sometimes in pastels that make you weep with gratitude? Search no more. Ames is the real deal. In “Smoke Follows Beauty,” he displays not only a mastery of the genre, but a startling breadth of theme and mood that makes the book a roller-coaster ride of the heart. Exceptional authors are in short supply these days, and great writers are fewer still, and I imagine that most readers (like me) had to stumble upon Brian Ames. He has the stuff.
Ames delivers his characters brilliantly and gently to the page; they've clearly got him in their grasp, and he has them in his. Gorgeous!
—
Susan Burmeister-Brown, editor,
Glimmer Train
Stories
Ames stirred me with his excellent, descriptive writing. I was impressed this range of knowledge—how he incorporated it into the stories and added depth, and with the variety of stories and their details. I appreciated the stillness of these tales, the insight, wisdom, and perspective gained from the woods juxtaposed with the rural, “civilized” world. His stories were creatively and aptly titled, all fascinating and sometimes profound. I loved the language, combined with the author’s careful thoughtfulness. His exquisite language and extraordinary metaphors just blew me away.
— Peggy Lambert
Ames’ prose and skillful use of powerfully descriptive words paint pictures for the reader much like really good poetry does. When reading about his characters’ adventures in the outdoors, you can feel the connection the author has with nature. If you have spent time in the wild, especially if it was in a solitary pursuit of any kind, you will love this book. Once you have read a few of his stories, you will have an overpowering urge to venture forth into the woods and finish reading the book while lying under the branches the nearest tree. Not a bad way to spend your time, if you ask me.
— Jim Klein
Call it an eclectic collection, but “Smoke Follows Beauty” is a book with many ties to Southwest Washington. The most obvious is that the author is a Vancouver native. Brian Ames, who now lives in Kent, graduated from Hudson's Bay High School in 1981. Ames’ book is a collection of short fiction, with most of the stories set in Washington. He especially uses the dark ancient forest to help explore the spiritual, paranormal and metaphysical. The story topics range from hunting to horseshoes to a bar down the street . To find out more about Ames and the book, visit www.pocolpress.com.
— Mike Bailey, staff writer, The Columbian (Vancouver, Wash.)
Ames’ collection is a work to be savored. He is obviously an outdoorsman, one who has a deep love of nature, and his love of nature is reflected in the beauty of his words. Ames describes the beauties of nature not just so the reader can envision them but so that the reader feels as though he or she is actually there, seeing and feeling and enjoying what the narrator of the story is experiencing. There’s a lot of Hemingway in the stories, not only in the way a love of nature comes through, but in the details that only one who has experienced and enjoyed life in the wilds could express them. Like Hemingway himself, Ames truly has a way with words.
— Paul Perry, author of Street People
Each of the 22 short stories in Brian Ames’ book, Smoke Follows Beauty are, as Ames puts it, “tales meant for telling around the campfire.” Like campfire lore, there is something in these stories – humor, insight, surprise, poetry – for everyone. Also in each, Ames tells us, is a similar underlying truth: The “natural and acceptable tendency of creation is to decay.” In the title story, for instance, Ames poignantly renders lost innocence and middle-age nostalgia by flashing back and forth in time between protagonist Eric Ball’s promising adolescence and compromised adult life. At the story’s unresolved close, Ball contemplates his life, “telling himself over and over, maybe naively, it’s not too late.” In a more light-hearted story, “Blue Mountain Discourse,” a nameless man emerges from the forest to tell an illuminating tale about hunting. A surprise shooting at the story’s conclusion calls into question the differing morality between hunting and killing. In a poetic story, “The Bones of Elk,” a solitary hunter wanders out into the cold quiet of early morning to search for elk. When a rodent sends a pinecone plummeting to its demise, the hunter is reminded of his “own small life” and “the end of all things.” All of the stories in Smoke Follows Beauty recall the familiar theme of “the end of all things.” However, Ames’ style of storytelling is compelling and makes for a lively read, even beyond the campfire.
— Janie Osborne, Big Sky Journal
There’s a scene in “The Kanasket Chicken Killings” that illuminates a great deal of what Brian Ames is up to in his collection of short stories, Smoke Follows Beauty. As he’s replacing the camshaft of a road grader, mechanic Henri DeLaat, trying to make sense out of what’s been happening on his farm, reduces the confusing events he’s been living through to a mathematical formula: “A, there are chickens going missing. B, it is probably the work of coyotes. C, coyotes can be stopped. D, how? A plus B plus C equals D, a simple equation.” Immediately, he drops a bolt into a greasepan, bends over to retrieve it, cracks his head against the undercarriage of the grader, then sits down hard, stunned by the blow. Suddenly the answer comes to him: “D, kill them, kill them all.” It’s as though the powers, whatever they may be, were telling him, “It’s not about intellect, dummy, it’s about blood.” Accepting his role as predator, Henri becomes part of the fabric of confusion and dissolution which, Ames seems to suggest, is the essence of reality. In story after story, Ames’s characters confront that reality, often in the context of magical or otherwise unusual circumstances. In “A Taste Like Fear,” Dr. Mullenix, a “real” mathematician, complacently hunts big game in Africa. But his self-satisfaction – and his mathematical certainty about the world – are shattered forever when he encounters, half-buried at the edge of a watering hole on the savannah, the mutilated, ravaged body of what appears to be a Maasai woman – except for the wings growing out of her back. “… [W]hat kind of place is this?” Mullenix asks in bewilderment. “In what place can one of God’s own angelic beings be violated and murdered?” Things don’t always turn out badly for Ames’s protagonists. In the book’s concluding story, “Something for Nothing, but Only Once,” an elk hunter sits at the edge of a clearing, waiting for game. Suddenly the charred end of a fallen log sprouts a face, and the face speaks to him: “There are no elk in this area. The elk are over at Glass Creek.” The hunter drives to the Glass Creek drainage, walks 40 yards into the woods, and voila! a magnificent elk steps into the crosshairs of his rifle. After downing the elk, quartering it, and packing it to his pickup, the hunter meditates, “I know, as I hike out slick in the bull’s fluids, that it’s a one-time deal. You can get away with it once in a while.” Smoke Follows Beauty is Ames’s first published book. Despite its flaws – chiefly the less-than-careful editing – it’s an impressive debut for this writer of talent and conviction, and it deserves to be widely read.
— George Bedirian, Washington State Magazine