Perry Glasser nails the curious kind we are: a tribe drunk with hope. This volume of stories reveals, page after terrific page, how we crawl from sleep into the crosswise light of a new day’s dread. 
—Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once.

Perry Glasser's superb storytelling conjoins grace and peril, making Dangerous Places irresistible to any reader who craves an authentic American voice and a sensibility that understands danger as a life-summoning force.
—Bob Shacochis, National Book Award-winning author of Easy In The Islands and Swimming in the Volcano

Perry Glasser's Dangerous Places is a fascinating collection of fabulous, funny, wildly different stories, each cunningly invented and firmly controlled by a fiction writer who has the wisdom, skill, and ease of a master.
—Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy, Atticus, and Exiles

Perry Glasser returns!  He understands the insistent magic of people’s ordinary dreams; and he writes with an insider’s wisdom about the true hardiness of hope.  This is good fiction – and worth the wait.
–Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies and At the Jim Bridger

Perry Glasser’s characters claim our emotional attachment; they are ordinary people walking a razor’s edge of  balance, one step from sudden disaster. These stories are Glasser’s best work yet.
—Philip Gerard, author of Secret Soldiers and Cape Fear Rising

What happens when America’s favorite typical teenagers start behaving like America’s typical teenagers?

When Mickey fixes the big Riverton-Haverhill basketball game by bribing Chuckker Washington to shave just a few points, Mickey clears enough coin to persuade Mickey’s Haverhill associate, a  leg-breaker named Danny Donnelly, to introduce Mickey to Aunt Sosha. Seeing possibilities for OxyContin in Riverton, Aunt Sosha sends Mickey home to start the business... but Aunt Sosha and her friend, Avram, an interrogator once dismissed from the Mossad for excessive zeal, hold Mickey’s buddy, Bughouse, hostage.

Maybe it would have all worked out if Mickey hadn’t been traveling with Madge. Madge is obsessed with the idea that she may be unreal, and the girl has a point. Her hymen grows back, no one in Riverton sickens or dies, no one has substantial memories. She feels the Eyes on her far too often, and her memory lapses disturb her. So when Bughouse is terrified of the comic book he finds, something called Archie, though Madge won’t let on, she is concerned. What could be worse than being a minor character in someone else’s dream?

But there is no time for philosophy. Before Mickey can slide into his usual booth at the Daddy Kane’s All-American Burger Shoppe and sell the first milligram of Oxy, Juice sees his old nemesis with his girl. Juice confuses Mickey’ head with a baseball, and since Juice is carrying a Louisville Slugger, he tries to hit a home-run... What else could Mickey do except reach for his Smith and Wesson .38?

from Part I

Danny nodded sorrowfully. “I can teach a monkey to pull a trigger. To handle a weapon, though, you have to be a man.” He tossed his revolver to Mickey. “Hold my gun while I fuck your girl.”

Danny spun Madge so her back was to his chest. Before she could make a sound, his hand clamped over her mouth. His other hand went into her black team jacket. The grommets unsnapped, sounding like so much popcorn. Danny’s big hand roamed roughly over her chest.

“Well are you going to stand there, boy?” he roared.”The first lesson about a weapon is to discover whether you have the balls to use it!”

metamemoirs
 memoirs with attitude.

Publishers’ inquiries are invited.

PUBLISHER’S INQUIRIES ARE INVITED

EXCERPTS

The next morning, Lucille’s eyes look like the cheap glass eyes on a carousel pony. Her smile has less to it than a sub-contractor’s promise. When I finally get to put my arms around her, my wife feels like a sack of broken tile.

Quit this, I ask her.

Fuck off, she says.

I hold her tighter. Please, I say.

Fuck off, she repeats.

This isn’t like you, I say. You’re killing yourself. It’s not worth it. Where do you get the strength?

Let’s fuck, she says. Do we have enough time?

-- from In Touch

Satan comes to our Thursday night meeting. He sits in the back, close to the door. We all know what that’s like. We have all been there. First-timer jitters. You sit. You smoke. You listen. Maybe you come back. Most don’t.

But this is Satan. You have to wonder.

Two weeks go by. We figure we are okay. But then Satan shows up again. Don’t ask me why Thursday. Don’t ask me why our meeting. No one can be turned away, right? But Satan says nothing. The Devil just sits in the last fold-up seat in the fourth row from the back, the one closest to the wall. He smokes. Cigarettes, too.

-- from Satan Takes 12 Steps

If there is a town in the Midwest or Southwest or Northwest that does not have a roadhouse named The Yellow Rose, I have not heard of it. Gravel in the parking lot. Set back from the road, half in the woods. Clouds of moths thick as a Biblical plague swirling up cones of white lights. Pick-ups parked helter-skelter out to the dark line where damp woods begin. Pool tables, thick smoke, dim lights and loud, loud music. At The Yellow Rose, we are out a ways from suburban Des Moines. We are out a ways from suburban anywhere. This is where drunken good ol’ boys do homicide with pool cues and bare hands for the honor of Betty Lou and the favor of her smile.

-- from Video Girl

No doubt about it, Artie and Jackie, who are about as close a life form to lichen that I know, have scored with two tarts. I will suffer many restless nights thinking of their luck.

But I cannot stop myself from thinking how Artie’s father is a butcher and so the back of his truck on a day as warm as this must reek of blood—beef, chicken, lamb and pork. I imagine the tangle of naked limbs rolling around on the floor of the truck; I imagine sticky squares of brown butcher’s paper. It gets no worse than this, I think. How could it get worse? Of course, as I get older, I learn it can get far, far worse.

-- from Norwegian Wood