Review: Steps

In vino veritas.

"The splatter of vomit against concrete. The dull grunts of sad lonely men screwing bored drunken women. The squeaking springs of filthy beds in decaying rooming-houses. In the hands of Steve Hussy these mundane, everyday sounds become poetry. Music."

- Tony O'Neill

In his introduction Tony O'Neill writes that reading Steps "may not be a comforting journey, but it's a rewarding one." For the unfamiliar, Steve Hussy is a writer that, while not relishing in the pure shock value alone, doesn't settle for a comfortable, easy read (see Savage Kick magazine, the magazine that Hussy edits which has published the likes of Dan Fante and Jim Goad). Instead in this limited edition chapbook, like the stories Tara and Wilson before, he offers up some hard-hitting semi-autobiographical doses of reality that will make you decidedly uncomfortable.

Written in sparse, gritty prose, Steps is the story of an unnamed narrator who is training to be a teacher, but not taking to the course at all: the course leaders "crowing, liberal, super-eager child-adults teaching nervous, confused child-adults how to teach," him "caught between feeling and reality and that need to fit into the latter." He watches a motley crew of short-lets rotate in and out of the boarding house where he's stuck, "I remember all the names, I could list them, but they meant nothing, a few words, a pass in the hall, a meal shared in the kitchen, nothing, nothing whatsoever." Pretending he doesn't care less for any of them, he connects with Lanny. What starts as a bit of fun (an affair behind a fellow roomer's back), escalates (out of "isolation, desperation, need") into an full-blown relationship, doomed (by the narrator's self-destructive tendencies) to failure and becomes painfully unpleasant in its final throes.

To those in the know, Hussy treads the same broken path that Messrs Bukowski and Fante have walked before him -- the drudge of working a job you despise, the sordid slid into the comfort of the bottle -- writers Hussy's character reads, "those crazy people". Yet, as Tony O'Neill says, he has a distinct poetic voice, a voice made his own. And the music? A harrowing Waitsian blues.


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Steps by Steve Hussy
Murder Slim Press
44 Pages