Local writer Rosalia Scalia stopped by Atomic Books recently for a book launch and reading of "Kiss Me, Stranger" by local author Ron Tanner. Here's her direct-to-Read-Street report on the illustrated novel (Thanks Rosalia!):
"Kiss Me, Stranger" offers a tragic, but comical commentary on war, violence, and consumerism as the narrator, Penelope, holds her family of 14 children together despite the civil war raging around them in their small country built atop a landfill.
"I wrote the first draft of this book about 10 years ago when I was going through a horrible divorce," Tanner told the standing room only crowd. "Every night, I'd go home to my sublet apartment and escape into this world because it was a safe haven as I was trying to hold everything together while everything around me fell apart. The family in this book prevails even while everything around them is falling apart."
During the reading, he held up posters, artwork of his own illustrations, and he gave away artifacts and passed out pieces of "Presidential Toffee," a candy that plays a role in the novel. The book contains more than 50 whimsical drawings depicting the darker objects and scenarios of the novel's imagined world. Aside from the Presidential Toffee, there's the Minotaur, a small car designed, manufactured and sold by the President despite its constant penchant to break down; the "mimi," or rocket bombs that scream past, among others.
"Ron is a Renaissance man and one of the funniest serious men I've ever met," said Clarinda Harriss, poet, Baltimore icon, and the force behind BHB Inc., a local press. "This book is hilarious but you can't read it without thinking about what's being reported on CNN every night."
Penelope's husband and son have been drafted by opposing factions, leaving her and the rest of the children to fend for themselves. The novel's dark humor explores the absurdity of war: the interchangeable factions wear pots for helmets and shoes consisting of milk cartons taped together with duct tape. The Metal Man also wears a pot helmet and comes daily to collect metals from Penelope and her nearly starving family which is forced to scavenge for scrap consisting of discarded consumer good in the bombed out city.
The novel's opening line thrusts the reader directly into the absurdity: "Unbeknownst to the children, I added wood shavings to their turnip stew last night: pine to be exact, which I grated meticulously as if it were hard cheese." Despite their deprivation, Metal Man forces them to turn over anything metal that can be melted into bullets. Then Penelope slaps the Metal Man when he makes an unreasonable request, an act that leads to her arrest and subsequent escape, sending her and her family literally into the landfill where the stupidity and absurdity of war collides with the destructive absurdity of modern consumerism.
"What a contradiction! The book is dark, makes us feel an interesting tension between dream and nightmare. As dark as it is, it's also so charming that we don't want to wake up," said Kathy Flann, organizer of the Atomic Fiction series and a faculty member at Goucher College.
James Magruder, author of "Sugarless," bought the book at Atomic. "I haven't read it yet but I'm looking forward to it. I read Ron's previous book, Bed of Nails, in which he gets us to glimpse his unique vision of the world that is both darkly funny and tender at the same time."
Tanner, known to some as the drummer in the musical group Jazz Caravan and to others as a writing professor at Loyola University, has won numerous awards for his fiction, including a Faulkner Society Gold Medal, a Pushcart Prize, a New Letters Award first prize, a Best of the Web award, among others. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and his collection of short stories, "Bed of Nails," won both the G.S. Sharat Chandra Award and the Towson Prize for Literature.