The Consequence of Skating

Gillis as only Gillis can: the politics of love, human action as theater, and the dreams we dream and chase forever.

Publishers Weekly

Gillis's flat fourth novel (after Temporary People) suffers from a lackluster plot served up via mounds of prose that ably demonstrates the old adage "less is more." Actor Mickey Greene is in the pits of despair after falling into drug-induced convulsions during a rehearsal, landing him in rehab, losing him his girlfriend, and forcing him to take a menial job as a security guard at an amusement park. Fortunately, redemption is in the offing: Greene dreams of getting his production of Harold Pinter's Moonlight taken by a major theater, discovers a potential new girlfriend, and takes up a wayward youth named Cam that he meets skating on a frozen lake. Greene also has the token über-successful friend who shames him with his easy dominance of life and provides Gillis with a conduit for hackneyed philosophizing (the friend's created a computer algorithm for predicting world events; its acronym is G.O.D.). The thin plot needs great prose to save it, but Gillis's run-on sentences and mixed metaphors read like material for an introductory copyediting course. (Sept.)

Steven Gillis is the author of the novels Walter Falls (2003), The Weight of Nothing (2005), and Temporary People (2008). Steve's stories, articles and book reviews have appeared in over four dozen journals. A collection of Steve's stories—titled Giraffes—was published in February, 2007. A second collection of Steve's stories—titled The Principles of Landscape—will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2011. A 3 year member of the Ann Arbor Book Festival Board of Directors, and a finalist for the 2007 Ann Arbor News Citizen of the Year, Steve taught writing at Eastern Michigan University and is the founder of 826michigan and the co-founder of Dzanc Books in partnership with Dan Wickett.