Passenger Review

I was sent a review of "Passenger" a while ago and have been forgetting to post it, so here it is! WARNING it may contain spoilers, and by spoilers, I mean seeing the actual words as they appear in the book or how lame the story itself is may spoil your appetite.

Here is my review as promised. Cannot say where I obtained this to read it, but let's just say Nicky was in a giving mood again and gave a few people free copies of Tabloid Purposes IV at an event. Thankfully one of the people that keeps giving away the copies they get to those of us who know how to have fun with them continues to get freebies, so I was able to review this dung heap free of charge. He'd flip at that, but since it was loaned to me no laws were broke. I also acknowledge that I am not of the same reviewing caliber of 50 Foot Ant or autoaim, but my heart is in the right place. My lunch is in the toilet after reading this though.

This is my review of "Passenger" by Nicky featured in Tabloid Purposes IV. Oddly enough in his foreword, one of your favorite people, Dagstine, is mentioned in a a positive light. Either you made up all those quotes on your blog about the threats, they were in on that together, or he has no memory. Another gem to note is before that, next to a crappy black and white picture of himself, he actually wrote "."If you're interested in hiring out the photography for your magazine, e-mail the editor since the photography is entirely his work." LOL he is supposed to be of professional quality? Can you imagine at the beginning of "Cujo" seeing Stephen King writing "If you are in need of a plumber, write the author of this book." or Edgar Alan Poe writing "If you are interested in having your chimney cleaned, send the author of this book a telegram."?!

Passenger is hilarious and typical Nicky.

In it, "Seth Miles", who is Nicky of course, is a writer who submits horror and science fiction stories to "small press" magazines, but drives a Greyhound bus to pay the bills. If you doubt yet that is supposed to be Nicky, you are blessed in never having read his work so you don't know he makes every story star himself. Since the law won't allow him to drive thank goodness, he has to write about what he knows, so his stories never have him or his characters in cars. This particular piece of shit features Greyhound buses and AMTRAK written just like that.

"...once in awhile he will get an individual who boards the bus then when it comes time to drop her off.
The passenger disappears."

That is exactly how that appears in the book. Instead of a comma, the sentence is split in two with a period. Shit like this is why Nicky stopped putting his shit at the beginning of his anthologies and started putting his own writing towards the end, because even with his megalomania he knows a potential buyer shouldn't see his writing otherwise they will pass on purchasing it.

"Most people his age settle down and start a family, but he has a girlfriend at home who is a painter."

Forget the horrible writing style that the most amature writer disapprove, the lack of sentence structure and information we don't need, and look at what the sentence is trying to tell you. Remember Miles is Nicky, so it's important that you know that Nicky isn't gay because he doesn't have a family yet, he has a girlfriend at home. Who is a painter. That plays no part in the plot, it's apparently important that we know this.

A teenager, a seventeen year old teenager, gets on the bus and has some books in her hand including the ones she is featured in. Her sitting on the bus allows the passengers to notice them and that she is in them somehow, and amazingly they all know that not only is she in those books, but that she writes what she knows about. If you don't know Nicky's M.O., he used to make a point of seeking out underage writers to publish in his anthologies. While you are soaking in the creepiness of this, you get another gem:

"Seth listened in the background and drove up the long stretch of of highway crossing the Illinois and Wisconsin border, and sometimes seeing the passenger who appears or disappears without a trace."

I am not lying, that really appears in the story exactly like that, in that spot.

In typical Nicky storytelling fashion, all the characters know about each other and about whatever supernatural thing is happening. Seth is supposed to be watching the road, but knows who the female author is, and even though she is only seventeen Seth read about her in a college paper. At this point the Loch Ness Monster could board the bus and start rapping, and I'd have an easier time swallowing that then what has already transpired in this story.

Seth starts chatting with Katie, who answers his question after she walks off the bus and somehow the convo keeps going, where she tells him she wrote a story based on her encounter with Sasquatch in Portland Oregon. Nicky, I mean Seth, recalls hearing a story where a friend saw a UFO over the Sears Tower. That's a reference to Tabloid Purposes III in case you cared, and you don't.

Their conversation features words like "published", "anthology", "magazine", all words that are featured at least three times in everything Nicky ever writes. I'm sure confused girls who went to school with Nicky received loved notes written by him featuring all of those words, because he has to mention them every damn day.

The rest of the story is a-typical Nicky: Strangers recognize "Seth" for the stories he has been featured in various anthologies, the strangers were in them too, Nicky's newest favorite thing to add to stories wherein his characters eat while they talk, "I heard", "I remember hearing about", "I've read", the word "Goth", a woman being put into a sleeping bag (just as we've seen in the House of Spider books that we now know stems from Nicky's "bondage sleepsack" fetish).

People being sick, every character in the story knowing back stories so Nicky doesn't have to write them out, all of the men in the stories have girlfriends or wives and you learn that not because it helps the story, but so that you'll know they aren't gay or too lame to get women, things being out of the pages of this and that, chicks being dressed in flannel and hiking boots just like Nicky, *sigh* everything taking place in Illinois cities or other places Nicky has lived, and every other paragraph Seth takes new passengers and apparently takes their money right there as Greyhound stopped selling tickets in his universe. New York? That'll be $35. British Columbia? That'll be $45. The Arctic Circle? That'll be $10. Oddly enough, "an emergency medical crew" is mentioned, but this is the first time I haven't seen Nicky write EMTs into the story. Maybe he is growing as a writer. No, no he is not.

Amazingly, every fucking passenger that gets on the bus has heard about the ghost female version of Nicky and all of them are able to piece together her back story, including the fact her parents encased her in clear resin instead of burying her. I hope they got the Joseph Stalin special since he seems to be holding up pretty well in his.

"I've overheard the whole story about..."
"I can just imagine..."
"I've heard about that too."
"Wait, are you talking about that woman who..."
"Yes we were mentioning something about that..."
"...because, they've mentioned they've seen the passenger..."
"...some of them knew the details of the phantom passenger..."
"I read about that one in a magazine up at a college magazine..."
"Are you talking about the woman from LaGrange..."
"Really, I leaned this from a couple small Gothic magazines..."
"Holy crap you're not feeding me a line on this one? I've just met you tonight but you're telling me a story that this passenger was on before,..."
"I think I know the name of the woman you speak of..."
"...and might have read about the story in the newspaper..."
"...couldn't remember any of the full details..."

Like most crappy Nicky stories, this really doesn't have much of a story, and it pains me to try and decipher it. So, because my review is disjointed and poorly written, much like anything Nicky pens, I'm going to spend some time with stupid quotes found in this parakeet cage fodder.

"On assignment, crap -- that's right I knew he ran a magazine."

"She pulled herself off the makeshift bed for a few minutes with the cordless phone to fix the blanket so she could wrap herself with it rather tightly." Until her official BSDM bondage sleepstack arrived in the mail no doubt.

"Even when Jeanne Peterson rests peacefully in her black sleeping bag at death within her physical body, her ghost is a frequent traveler - an eternal passenger." because her bondage sleepstack just wasn't bonding enough I guess.

They had her covered in a black velour sleeping bag." black velour feels soft on Nicky's unwashed body!

"We're all going to Mt. Rushmore", they've individually answered.
"From here? That'll be $45." of course it will be.

In closing, I would rather have a rusty pair of pliers slowly pull out all of my toenails than to ever have to read this again.

I hope you all found this review helpful since it seemed to have scarred the reviewer for life. I'm sure he will recover in time to review Tabloid Purposes V.