Another Quiet Night in Desperation

For those unafraid of the dark . . . .

Comes a series of entertaining and thought-provoking stories as modern as MySpace and as timeless as revenge.

Welcome to Desperation, the small north Florida mill town that is purgatory to 3,636 doomed souls—less after tonight.

Beneath the billowing smoke that blots out the sun, its inhabitants lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Another Quiet Night in Desperation is a powerful collection of literate, provocative tales of lost innocence, doomed romanticism, hard-edged cynicism, obsession, desperate desire, and shadowy sexuality—stories about adults for adults.

In these fictions of fate and futility, entropy and eroticism, acclaimed author Michael Lister takes readers on an exciting and twisting tour of the heartbreak of human frailty in a dead-end town dangling on the edge of oblivion.

Introduction by Jim Pascoe

Yeah, it's true. I'm quite familiar with desperation. I mean, come on. I live in Hollywood.

No, not Hollywood, Florida, which is a real city; unlike my neighborhood in Los Angeles, which exists on signs and shows and movies but is really more a state of mind. So for those of you who have never been out this way and only know Hollywood from what you see on TV, let me break it down for you:

Hollywood is a slum.

Sure, it's in a bit of an upswing. The Academy Awards are actually held here again and not in some Masonic lodge downtown. Hot spot bars are sprouting up faster than arsonists — excuse me, I mean "accidents" — can burn them back down. But don't let the gentrification fool you. The dark parts are still dark. And the ugly — yeah, it's still ugly.

There's a reason I'm mentioning all of this, and it's because when I first visited Michael Lister for the Gulf Coast Writers Conference, I felt an instant kinship both with him as a writer and with the eerie beauty of North Florida. In fact, I became practically obsessed with the old paper mill towns like Port St. Joe, like Destin, like Desperation.

Desperation, just like Hollywood, is a slum. I don't mean this as a casual put down. Look beneath the surface; that's right, it's dirty, the worst kind of dirty, the dirty from the dirt of broken dreams. It's a landscape that's quiet, too quiet. When I was there and closed my eyes, I could hear secrets whistling through the thin paper trees.

Michael Lister must have heard them too ... only when he opened his eyes, he put the voices on paper. He captured their pain, their longing, their desires, their guilt, their desperation. That's noir, baby. It screams through this collection. Not in some kind of punk, pulpy throwback. No private dicks in fedoras. No venetian blinds. No rat-a-tat-tat. The noir of these stories comes from people making bad decisions, from mistaken observations, from the downward spiral of lost souls.

What I love most in these pages is the sense of doom that drips over everything. There is never doubt that bad shit is going to happen. You don't know when it's going down — hell, you might not even get to see it go down — but, believe me, it is going to go down.

At its best, this gives each story an urgency, one that makes me want to skip ahead because I have to find out what happens next. Whether it's simple lines like this classic from "The Hunt":

His phone rang again. It never rang, and now it had rung twice in the last few minutes.

Or this delicious dialog exchange from "Bait and Switch" in which a mysterious creep asks a young computer wiz to do him a simple job. In Desperation, nothing is simple, and as the job drags on, the boy asks...

How long we gonna do this?

Not long, he said. It won't take long.

What won't?

In Another Quiet Night in Desperation , Michael Lister succeeds.

So enjoy these dark tales. I'll see you again, right around the corner.

Jim Pascoe, author of Undertown