Don Webb has a reputation for being one of those hyperactives, busily fizzing away on the lunatic fringe; a free radical. Neither Stealing My Rules nor The Explanation & Other Good Advice will dampen this reputation. He has been called a "mad shaman genius," and it's easy to see why: he'd be happy to have this quoted on his jackets, but it's not quite accurate. With all respect, the word "genius" is inappropriate; indeed it actively misrepresents his work. From a genius we would expect more consistency--not of form, necessarily, nor of style, but consistency of intellectual vigour. What Don Webb is (to hijack the quotation) is a mad shaman experimenter, and it's precisely to his credit that we, as readers, have no idea what to expect from one of his tales.
Webb is a man who swings punches at the shadows, or at the fences. His work seems mood-driven, paranoid, dreamy. An analogy: When a woman is pregnant-her body incapacitated by irregular chemical tides-she sometimes craves odd things to eat... or things which seem odd to those who are not also pregnant. My brain, I think, is subject to irregular chemical tides from time to time, too (they're called moods) and I sometimes crave Don Webb. Or at least I crave some of his work. So, in this sense, Webb is ice-cream on pickled onions; Webb is bacon cheesecake with soy sauce. (Put that on a cover!)
Webb is quirky and unreliable. From The Explanation, "The Occult Revival" is magnificent (in this a "Damnation Army" band plays outside a bar, growing in popularity, and the story promises that "Soon it will be in your town"); but the cod-Burroughsian "Hypoborea Lite" is half-a-page long, and more or less unreadable (which is quite an achievement, if you think about it). "The Golden Bough Revisited" is a sad and powerful story about a "dying god (who regrets) the Aristotelian form his career had taken. Beginning Middle End." This story is a perfect example of the shock ending at which Webb excels; another would be "Hocus," in which a man who cannot obtain a calendar is told that his time is up. Yet another ice-finale can be found in the cruel and excellent "Kaj." A man named Leiva wants a large woman for a bride, and "Kaj Savoy was the girl built to Mr Leiva's specifications."
"Junk" proves that it's possible for William Burroughs to have inspired a good story-but this would be the Burroughs of Junky rather than of Nova Express. In it, a man named The Octave Doctor sells (among other things) "a small onyx mushroom" that will deliver unto its user "all the pussy he wants." Webb writes about sex in this story without actually writing about sex: "The skull sticky in his hand. Hard chunky sticky caramel, he feels the bigger chunks slide gaggingly slow down his throat." "Looking Glass," a murder story, is another favorite, as Webb's jivey prose ("a hangover that would kill small cattle") makes it swing and ring. At 8-and-a-quarter pages, it's one of the volume's longer pieces. Detective Sergeant Blick is the hero, but no police procedures will be able to help him with this case.
Of the more off-the-wall stories in this book, also enjoyable are "Problematical Approaches to the Fiction of D.B.," the densely jokey-but-metaphysical "Everyday Quests," and "Alkahest" (all half-page of it). But what of this mad shaman experimenter's experiments that didn't work? Well, "My Mother's Concrete Character" was underwhelming, and "The Kiln," quite frankly, unfinishable. However, let's put it into perspective. At a little over 120 pages, The Explanation & Other Good Advice is stuffed with 26 stories, with only 16 of them having been previously printed. Rare would be the reader who liked every one; even rarer the reader who did not like any... So you don't appreciate peanuts in your coffee? Then try this salted grapefruit instead.
Stealing My Rules is written with the same unstinting insistence on originality; with the same self-sufficiency. Furthermore, it's a better- produced volume. "That Old Time Religion" opens with a bona fide Webb-trademarked stylism: "Liz Morrow had that elusive sort of beauty that increases toward 2:00, or whatever the closing time of the bar she was in was." "Reaganomics" is more in the Burroughsian Nova Express tradition, with many a hyphen and splintered thought process-like choppy guitar riffs, perhaps. "The Works of Hieronimous Bosch Considered as Realism" was a favorite, a gleaming jewel in a skinny royal casket. Stealing My Rules is a little more uniform than The Explanation; but that's a little like comparing the world's two tallest dwarves. Stealing My Rules is as wacky as hell when considered next to the work of Webb's contemporaries. And not bad value either, for five bucks.
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