"Jack's Lions," the story I randomly flipped to (because that's the concept of one chapter book reviews, see, is I randomly select one chapter of a book and review it on that basis), gets off to a strong start. Really strong, actually. Check out this hook:
A man named Thor once split my head open with a crowbar. Most people initially think I'm joking when I say this, but I read the police report -- it clearly said his name was Thor.
In a way, those couple of sentences perfectly capture what Moehring does well in his writing: an image striking enough to immediately arrest the attention, imbued with a conversational tone and a sideways sense of humor that gives you the sense of listening as much as reading; as a matter of fact, Moehring is clearly aware of that tone, since he interrupts the story from time to time to describe how he (the narrator is named Ryan) would tell this story at a party. It's a little gimmicky, but for the most part, it works.
It's interesting, then, that the exact next sentence likewise almost perfectly captures what Moehring does not do well:
Yes, there exists a man in this world whose first name is Thor, and he apparently wanders around the Midwest, ruthlessly clobbering strangers in the head with crowbars.
A fiction teacher I once had whose work I admired often used to say, "you have to kill your babies." Which sounds mildly horrifying, but what it means is this: As a writer, you will become attached to the things you write -- those sentences that have a cadence or an image you like, even just words that have cool sounds. Boring as it may be, though, the most important thing in writing, we must learn, is utility: If it doesn't serve a purpose, toss that shit.
The sentence above does not serve a purpose. It's an okay joke, but it establishes little new information, and what meager information it does establish is, within the context of the story, misleading: In fact, Thor does not seem to be a man who wanders around clobbering strangers in the head. In the story, he is a man whose friend is in a fight with the narrator's cousin, Jack, over something that is not clear to the narrator (because the narrator is really, really stoned) but seems to involve whose brand of truck is the more superior. It's a fine conceit that capably captures the personality of a place -- small-town Nebraska -- its moods and dramas, its men and their concerns. It's got a serviceable plot (events leading up to a random fight) and an impressive share of insightful asides and humorous jokes. Make no mistake: There's some talent here.
What it lacks is discipline. Like a rose bush, a story cannot bloom until it is pruned -- or to use a more Nebraska-ish metaphor, you can't put ruffles on a pig. Well, maybe you can, but it'll do you about as much good as a rose bush at at truck stop.
