Let Slip the Dogs of Love by Eugene Kachmarsky

Book Description
In an urban legend style of storytelling flavored with magical realism, Let Slip the Dogs of Love blends together a thought-provoking collage of mesmeric short stories. It grips your full attention by flinging open, widely, a few infinite portals of perception. It brings an awareness to consider why we feel the things we do. This tapestry of stories reveals the sublime, ridiculous, triumphant and tragic ways in which ordinary people deal with the often extraordinary consequences of their choices and actions. With a rapidly and frequently changing pace and rhythm, taking gentle curves and sudden, unexpected hairpin-turns at full centripetal force, these ironic and karmic accounts tell tales of love, crime, poverty, tragedy, greed and evil in a thoughtful, sometimes playfully humorous, youthful voice. Delve with wonder into the depths that lie beneath the surface of all things in a quiet, sleepy metropolitan suburb. Eugene Kachmarsky was born in Toronto, Canada, to Ukrainian immigrant parents. The majority of his formative years were spent growing up in the neighborhood of Eatonville, in the western Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, the foundation setting for the stories in Let Slip the Dogs of Love. He lives, writes and swims with the current deep in the heart of Toronto, Canada.

My thoughts
I don’t read many books of short stories, but have read a few. “Let Slip the Dogs of Love” by Eugene Kachmarsky is a collection of Twilight Zone type stories that border on the edge. As stated on the cover, this is a book of suburban legends of the living and the dead (quite a mouth full). Anyway, there are 15 stories in total and interestingly enough, my favorite was the first in the book “Celsius 232.7”, a story about a young man in search of a much needed fix. Other favorites are “The Gateman” and “Banana Yellow Rubber Orb of the Prophets” an interesting tale of a meeting in an elevator. The stories range from short (4 pages) to almost novella size (50 pages). Kachmarsky’s stories take place mostly in Toronto, a city he is most comfortably in and it shows as it makes me feel that I am there. An enjoyably book of absurd and thought-provoking tales.