Phone Call from Hell and Other Tales of the Damned

Woods (Bad Juju and Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem) offers 17 outlandish, often violent and raunchy excursions into neo-pulp. The title story involves looking for a date on the suggestion of a random phone call from Charles Manson. In “Writer’s Block,” Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene hunt for action in 1959 Havana. “FTS”—well, the title says it all. Some of the yarns are not so much short stories as micronovels—“The Other,” an intense hunt for serial killers; “Crash & Burn,” an explosive opus on the Texas-Mexico border. Trademark wild-ass similes and metaphors emblazon almost every page: “The imperious tropical sun beat down relentlessly like the cat-o-nine-tails of the Marquis de Sade”; “the moon burst above the eastern hills like a floodlight on a prison break”; “Her eyes glowed like burning German cities after a B-17 night raid.” You want it brazen and loud, Woods really knows how to bang that gong. (Apr.)