On the Horizon

Samuel Jay Keyser

First off: I have to approach this as a collection of short fiction rather than a collection of poetry. If I tried to think of this incredibly unpoetic writing as poetry, it would immediately be given zero stars and consigned to the nearest bonfire. This is prose, pure and simple. Once we're past that barrier, there are some odd, intriguing things about this collection of work. For example, why on earth would a church not only release, but have the author read during the weekly service, pieces of a polytheistic nature? (No, I don't have an answer to the question. If I did, it wouldn't be intriguing, would it?) One of the questions, unfortunately, points to the book's fatal flaw. That being “why did the pastor of said church not ask Keyser to make these things sound more like parables than Aesop's fables?” Keyser's writing is witty, ingenious in places. There's a lot to like in most of these short, pithy tales. Until, that is, you get to the last sentence. There are two pieces in the book whose last sentences don't start “And that is why...” or “And that is how....” Those two pieces, not coincidentally, are the strongest two here. (A third has the same ending, but with an unexpected twist: it fits in with the story rather than being a “the moral of the story is...” cap, and that makes it a delightful change from the weary moralistic repetition.) The worst part is that most of the time the moral of the story is easily understood from the story itself, but Keyser feels the need to take out his dead fish on almost every page and hit the reader over the head with it. There is no soul-searching to be done here, no textu I would love to see a second collection, or a revision of this one, from Keyser, with the prose set as prose instead of chopped up to look like poetry (and if the man thinks this stuff actually IS poetry, instead of using the form to make the collection look bigger, he is in need of some serious re-education) and the “moral of the story” sentence excised from each. Such a book would probably garner a star and a half, maybe two stars, more than this one did. But its flaws are enough to slightly outweigh its strong points; it does, however, have a good number of both.