The Yellow Rose Diner, a place where you can sip on old coffee, eat nasty meals, and hear a few nasty tales about the human condition.

Greasy spoon diners have always been my thing.  Of course these days it’s mainly there to pick off inebriated patrons before they have a chance to sober up.  It’s the perfect place to pick off human prey, almost a zombie’s wet dream.  At one point in American history these places were the quintessential example of the American experience, the small time restaurants to be experienced on a drive across the American countryside; these days they are more a place to chill for a bit while sobering up after a long night of drinking.  Not to say there aren’t still advantages to such establishments for the living, for instance, a stay in Saint Louis, MO will undoubtedly lead you to the Courtesy Diner right outside the Saint Louis Zoo for a staple of the region, the awesomeness that is a slinger (the one food I regret not being able to eat anymore).  Still, I would recommend staying away if you’re a little intoxicated.  Saint Louis has a large zombie populace that loves to hang around the Courtesy Diner, we can’t eat the slingers anymore but the cheese fries are still awesome.

I’m having a hard time classifying this collection.  I would love to say it’s a short story anthology but it’s not entirely that.  I would love to call it a novel but it’s not entirely that either.  The Yellow Rose Diner and Fill Station is something entirely in its own classification.  I guess in the end I’m going to have to classify it as a novel anthology, that’s the only way I can think of classifying it.  It is a nearly linear story that follow the lives of a group of people who only briefly meet at a tiny shit hole restaurant known as The Yellow Rose Diner and Fill Station.  Let me see if I can explain it a little better than that.  We start out with two small time thieves, Shelby and Arnold, casing their next target, which happens to be The Yellow Rose.  As they sit discussing their own private brand of philosophy, a question is raised, the question being “What’s the worst thing you have ever done.”  This is overheard by a patron sitting right behind them who begins to ponder this himself.  Arnold and Shelby wind down their conversation and when their introduction comes to a close we go over to the patron sitting behind them and his story Dying of the Light.  The mystery man is a photo journalist who has had a terrible burden to bear in his life thanks to a run in with the Mexican Drug Cartel’s Saint Death and when his story comes to a close we go straight back to Arnold and Shelby in their never ending debates.  The collection moves forward in such a way until it’s foreseeable and yet still unknowable ending.  Trust me, while you may see it coming, you really won’t.  Cryptic description?  Then I guess you will just have to purchase the collection to understand what I’m talking about.

{Not An Actual Picture From The Book, Just What I Imagine}

I was an immensely huge fan of this collection, not just in the stories presented within but with how it was put together as well.  I’ve seen similar attempts to do a collection like this before but never this successful.  Erik Williams (who also does Dying of the Light) writes the bits about Arnold and Shelby to perfection, think of them as The Sopranos meet Reservoir Dogs meet a twisted version of Harold and Kumar…just without the ganja.  These pieces are always interesting and never feel like fodder added to expand the word count.  I actually looked forward to reading them as much as I did the rest of the stories, which all deserve a mention themselves. 

John Mantooth’s This Is Where The Road Ends takes us on a trip through absolute guilt as Jonas tries to overcome the horrible act of drunken manslaughter when a drunk driving trip ends with the loss of a boy’s life.  The story truly goes through guilt, regret, and a shame that is almost impossible to move away from in a way that I think all readers will be able to relate to in some way or another (no, you don’t have to have murdered a child).  Doshalo` by Kim Despins gives new meaning to the phrase “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” when Rae, a woman driven by a past tragedy, ends up the recipient of a very important Gypsy spell book after finding herself cursed to relieve said tragedy.  When she becomes the victim of betrayal, those who betrayed her are going to find themselves the victims of a curse, one that may damn Rae as well.  The always sardonic Sam W. Anderson shows his great talent for cynical humor with the tale Hate Crimes and Therapy Over Cream Chipped Beef, though this tale most definitely has it’s serious side as well.  In it we find Darien White, an obsessive compulsive bounty hunter with a bit of a racist streak toward white people, but it seems that something may have snapped this time around as his bounty isn’t his bounty at all, it’s his psychiatrist, Doctor Sydney Love.  There is one more thing I need to mention before moving on from Hate Crimes, there are no good guys and there are no bad guys; that’s one of the story’s greatest successes.  Both parties are wrong, but both are wrong for the right reasons, they both have convincing reasons why they do what they do but it just isn’t enough to grant them an escape from the seventh circle of hell.  The next to last story is Petra Miller’s Knowing the Deal.  The basic premise is simple, a man can see the results of a person’s death about three days before it actually happens but the emotional strength written into the story is what gives it so much effect.  I hope to god Miller has never had anything close to what happens in this story ever happen to her (there is a lot more than the supernatural aspect that I WILL not give away) but I would not be surprised if it had.  This story reaches deep down into aspects of human pain and suffering that only a few have ever experienced.  If zombies could shed tears, I may very well have shed some myself by the time this story was over.  The final story, and in my opinion the best in this collection, is Kurt Dinan’s The Darkness Game, a story that touches on many things we have all felt, parts of which got to me personally for various reasons.  It’s another simple premise…at its start at least, a Christian schooled do-gooder decides she is tired of being the nice one and wants to be something more, but in her quest to achieve “darkness” she loses who she is.  It would be hard for me to say their weren’t emotional reasons why this tale resonated with me so much but there was something even deeper that had me fully appreciating this story.  No matter who you are, from the King of Saudi Arabia to the lowest of human beings, we have all wanted to be something more than what we were, something beyond our upbringing and Dinan captures this perfectly.  His story is a beyond perfect rendition of the human condition to achieve and the disastrous consequences this sometimes has.  This is, of course, not the end of the collection as one final tale remains for the legacy of our interlopers Shelby and Arnold. 

This is a must own collection that will affect you both emotionally and mentally, one of those collections that leaves you pondering what it means to be a member of the species Homo Sapiens.  I would immediately recommend this to anyone wanting a rollercoaster of a story, you will not be disappointed.

The_Undead_Review

Written By: Erik Williams, John Mantooth, Kim Despins, Sam W. Anderson, Petra Miller, and Kurt Dinan

Published By: Sideshow Press and Snutch Labs

Horror-Web Rating: 5 Stars Out of 5