A Voice for Independent Authors

“You can kill a book quicker by your silence than by a bad review.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

REVIEWING TODAY: CRUEL AND UNUSUAL BY ERIK DEAN

With a perfectly designed and truly intriguing cover to successfully entice those fiction readers avidly preferring the more strange and unusual in their literary fare, the four short stories in Cruel and Unusual by Erik Dean comprise a most cleverly unique and deceptively quirky book that links themes of universal justice with those of the more individually-inspired, supernatural realms. Convicted and executed witches execute their own perfect retribution after death. A lawman and a peddler team up together to do quite the same. The Devil gets a chance to testify in court. And justice teams up with game-show television to execute the perfect final punishment upon a nasty, convicted felon.

The stories in Cruel and Unusual are clever and entertaining, and at first one suspects that Erik Dean might be writing for the Young Adult audience. His composition style is quite concise; his sentences often painfully assertive, with the gut punches and uppercuts of a skillful boxer. But his wry cleverness and his sardonic wit – as well as his powerfully sparse writing style – do not conceal Mr. Dean’s unerring ability to target the voyeuristic pleasure that we all, often secretly, indulge. And this is certainly not limited to young adults. Furthermore, embedded in these marvelously engaging stories is an intelligence and observance aware of the human proclivity for seeking vengeance over justice, mean-spirited as that may be, and worse, for seeking guilty pleasure at cruelty doled out as fairness.

In the end, Mr. Dean lays claim to the finest writing compliment: the stories in Cruel and Unusual are wonderfully entertaining. Beyond the style, beyond the cleverness and wit, and beyond the guilty pleasure, the reader cannot help but sport a nasty smirk while reading. He is, you see, enjoying cruel and unusual entertainment.