Review: Tales told around a Strange Fire

Bud Templin, Tales told around a Strange Fire (BookBaby 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/236380072-tales-told-around-a-strange-fire?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_32

Other-worldly tales told around an other-worldly fire

Though these stories are all different and are not connected in terms of plot, the scene keeps returning to the Firefeeders’ Fire, where workers throw cart-loads of ‘stuff’ into an other-worldly fire, and the stories they tell while they work. The ‘chapters’ alternate between a story around the Fire and a story told around the Fire. The final chapter finally tells us how the Fire started.
These stories offer wonderful examples of good writing. A skilful, exciting style, and not same-y; each story is different. Different not only in content but in style as well. Superbly innovative ideas. I was impressed by the Intros of all these stories—the first lines and first paragraphs immediately hook you. Not only is the dialogue excellent, it conveys each character, each narrator brilliantly. I really admired the use of dialect to render the Voice of the old men in ‘Waitin on Satan’.
I loved the metaphors: ‘makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like Sesame Street’, ‘truck horns, like the vanguard of a barbarian horde’, ‘strong and bad as a Tyrannosaurus Rex’, ‘he felt as grand as the Tetons, as lucky as Luciano’.
I have loved ones who are hoarders, and all the references to cart-loads of ‘stuff’ was a bit triggering, not that it put me off the stories.