Brian Ames Boeken

Head Full of Traffic dishes nearly two dozen tales of deliciously dark doomsday scenarios. Head Full of Traffic is a veritable tour-de-force of fantasy horror pieces. Grab a brush and paint in Istvan’s warped world. Wake up with Brandon Verity, spokesman for Pacific Northwest Power & Light. Slow down vehicles with Randy and his road crew. See what Grandpa's planting in his orchard. Not recommended for those that can’t or won’t ride roller coasters of the imagination. Cover art by Ken Meyer, Jr.

From the depths of comfortably dim forest on the Eastern slopes of Washington’s Cascades Mountains comes Smoke Follows Beauty, a short fiction collection from emerging author Brian Ames. With a distinctly rural sense of place and unforgettable characters, Smoke Follows Beauty takes readers along the hunt for wonder whose game is satisfaction. These tales echo those meant to be spoken around the half-light of campfires, and seeks to restore a needed measure of awe and mystery to life, so lacking in our 21st century existence. The books offers eclectic subject matter – from hunting to horse-shoeing, rescue to unprecedented disaster, colonial Africa, a mountain elk-hunting blind, a bar down the street, to a pleasant apocalypse. Smoke Follows Beauty engages an exploration of the spiritual, paranormal, metaphysical – in the darkest, most ancient parts of the forest, where vapors gather, rise, take shape.

Consider a common item of the salt lick. Name a rural town after it. Put in authority a megalomaniacal mayor. Populate it with foothills people bent to do his bidding. Set in the Cascades, Salt Lick shakes and burns as their lives carom from the orderly to the boundaries of control and beyond. Whether Salt Lick’s citizens survive the resulting mayhem brews a black comedy part David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, part Russell Banks’ Trailer Park.

“As Many Hands As God” is the fourth short-story collection by critically acclaimed literary fiction author Brian Ames. The book’s 19 stories survey wide-ranging landscapes – both tangible and psychological – in posing the If there is a creator, and if that creator intervenes in human affairs, how does that intervention come about? The author’s geographies include the bright, bleached deserts of the West’s Great Basin; the desensitizing darkness of a New Jersey hotel room; the humid torpor of a Midwest minor league baseball diamond at high summer; and time-shifting through an apple orchard in central Washington state in search of forgiveness. Ames explores themes of loss and recovery, ache and joy, offense and reconciliation, sin and redemption. Ultimately, he stakes out a position that if God does have hands and intervenes in humanity, those hands are people – of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds.