Straight Razor

...He is a product of his times - or perhaps an anti-product. He looks at the dominant culture that surrounds him, and he is mostly disturbed by it. Disturbed by the dehumanizing effects of mandatory technology. Will the Luddites in the audience without a cell phone please raise their hands? Disturbed by the wholesale abuse and slaughter of people and animals. Disturbed by media anchordroids who mindlessly spew the party line. And what is the party line? This above all: To thine own corporate parents be true. Consume. This is what it means to be American. If you want to belong, you better buy a GM and Keep America Rolling. Do your part. Fork over your meager earnings from your cubicle job so that you may affirm your patriotism. If you love your country, you will support its corporate entities. Because you are either with Us or you are with the Terrorists. In this time in particular, dissention is not allowed. Certainly you have the right to free speech, as long as you say the right thing. Harold Jaffe doesn't say the right thing...everyone's [ticked] off...Why does he do this? He likes animals; why doesn't he just write Call of the Wild II? He does it because he can't help it. You see, "If you have love enough, then go on, rage, rage out of love." And Jaffe loves enough. And so he rages. He rages against a society he finds largely unsupportable, bloated, greedy, ravenous, jealous, demanding, hypocritical, entrenched, bulletproof, painted with hypnotic DAY-GLO colors. Jaffe uses the same tactics as the media-frenzy culture we live in. He writes with a merciless efficiency and swiftness. He intrudes upon us with unidentified, disembodied voices, like in "Necro," parroting the in-your-face media fixation and regurgitation of warped "reality" programming. He doesn't linger on any aspect of his story for too long. He lights from flower to flower. Fast, list-like stories like "Carjack," "14 Ways of Looking at a Serial Killer," and "Things to do During Times of War" echo the need for the national attention-span to please not be stressed for anything longer than what would normally be broken, mediated, by a Word from Our Sponsors...Many readers would turn their ire back upon the author. But Jaffe's provocations are intentional. He's trying to get the reader stirred up, and then, hopefully, to examine this agitation and seek its actual source - the culture we live in, for that, in so many ways, is what is insupportable... Jaffe seeks to get us riled up, but unlike most fiction, he does not allow resolution, satisfaction, gratification. If we seek release, we must look within ourselves, examine our own thoughts, our own responses, our own reactions. Jaffe's tales are so extreme, so hyperreal, because such extremity is necessary to disassociate the reader from such an intense media-saturated culture, thereby eliciting a state of mind where it becomes possible to examine the network while standing outside the network, instead of being asleep inside the netwo

I'm a Jaffe enthusiast: I admit it. I read whatever he writes, and Straight Razor is him at his best: an uncanny series of innovative stories with perfect pitch dialogue and extraordinary passion--both personal and political.