In his warm blurb, Shawn Berman vouches that Ben Shahon as a writer who’s all heart. Clocking in at 22 pages, A Collection for No One to Read gives a humble overview of Shahon’s work to date, collecting pieces from Taco Bell Quarterly and The Daily Drunk, as well as a few other magic tricks pulled from up his sleeve.
Shahon weaves a cast of bemused and bemusing characters throughout Collection. A staggering party-goer in “How to Have a Supremely Good Time” gives way to a face-planting second grader in “Rachel Peterson’s Worst School Photo”; a magician’s rabbit escapes “The Terrific Thomas” meets a blinded Polyphemus in “Some Thoughts on Being Blinded By That Rat Bastard Odysseus.”
But for all the whimsy in Collection, Shahon’s stories aren’t necessarily light. There’s a thread of existential questioning that runs throughout the work that shouldn’t be dismissed, even as Shahon dodges and feints with humour.
The staggering party-goer in “Good Time” drinks to avoid “the inevitable heat death of the universe.” In “76”, a long-haul trucker in interstate limbo phones a gospel hotline with questions about objective truth and the interplay between God and science, only to hit a tape recording. Sometimes the existential urge is dealt with more directly, in “Allegory of a True Believer”; sometimes indirectly, as an operator for the Human Operations and Logistics Department of Society for Technology Offering Progression (HOLD/STOP) fucks with callers in a kind of cosmic joke in “One Moment. Please Hold”.
Nowhere is existential urgency more visceral than in a collection of erasure stories in triplicate. “Will We See You at the HOA Meeting?” cascades into “Will We See You?” and “Will We?” as a meditation in the vein of Niemöller’s “First They Came…”. Through literal erasure on the page, Shahon contemplates the erasure of non-conforming groups, and individuals, a creeping threat as his characters watch houses burn around them and wonder when the fire will come for them.
It’s a gift to be able to weave heavy subject matter with warmth, and Shahon’s first collection shows he’s got that gift well in hand. You can pick up your copy of A Collection For No One to Read at Bottlecap Press now.
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Kirsti MacKenzie (@KeersteeMack) is the author of Better to Beg, as well as editor in chief of Major 7th Magazine and Tough Bastard Books. Her work has been published in Rejection Letters, Autofocus, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.
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Ben Shahon is a writer whose work has appeared in a number of journals, including Taco Bell Quarterly, The Daily Drunk, and others, and is he the EIC of JAKE. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College and BA’s in Philosophy and Creative Writing from Arizona State. Ben is surprised people keep letting him, but is currently at work on both short and long fiction somewhere in the U.S.
Ben’s fiction, often of an experimental/literary stripe, often tackles themes of youth, relationships, situational comedy, and existentialism. In nonfiction, Ben has also written criticism for film and TV, notably in his column Escape From Springfield for The Daily Drunk, which tackles the writing craft and cultural hitory of The Simpsons.
Ben is also the primary editor behind JAKE, an online journal centering Anti-Literature.
Rejection Letters 