cover image What They Always Wanted

What They Always Wanted

Christopher G. Janus. Sheffield Books, $0 (235pp) ISBN 978-0-934831-01-7

Thirteen shallow tales by the author of Miss 4th of July, Goodbye blandly depict a jewel thief, the duplicity of a friend and love gone sour. Characters meander about``He knew what to do, and he would do it. And this is what he did''but much is compelled by the vagaries of fate. Janus does not have the imaginative skills to vivify his Greek tragedies: they are flat without detail, contrived and predictable with stale language and plot. In ``Alexander and Cassandra,'' one of several interlocking stories about an inexorably doomed family, a journalist plans to write an expose on an escort service that once employed the mother of a man who is both her lover and half-brother. It will come as no surprise to the reader that she eventually becomes an ``escort'' herself and scraps her career and beau. (Jan.)