This is the last bit of news I got, oh, a month and a half ago, and now that I finally, finally have my copy the May LOCUS, I can share the review Faren Miller wrote of my collection, Gunning for the Buddha:

Locus Looks at Books: Faren Miller

This time I'll deal with a rich crop of collections, plus a first novel by a writer who made an impressive debut with a collection last year. All come from small independent presses, meaning low print runs but high quality and attention to detail, including the cover art [shout-out to my cover artist pal, Jamie Bishop].

[Reviews of story collections by Carol Emshwiller, Howard Waldrop, and Gregory Frost (one of my Clarion teachers!) take place before mine.]

Michael Jasper hasn't adapted to the 21st century after a career in the previous one; this is his time. In his first collection Gunning for the Buddha, the 1996 Clarion graduate shows more than youthful promise as he (re)imagines America in the past, present and future, with detours into a few even stranger places.

The title story, named for a Shriekback song (which I recently saw on another book's "soundtrack" list), derives from a far older concept. For the protagonist, this translates as "I had to kill all the Buddhas because it was their fault the world was riddled with chaos." He adds,

Don't get me wrong. I wasn't being bigoted in my choice of targets. If I saw Christ on a sidewalk in San Francisco, I'd gun the engine and splat him onto the windshield as quick as you could say 'Peace be with you.' Same deal for Abraham and Mohammed, for holy women and medicine men in charge of their flocks. All of them had to go. Too much of their misguided teachings had trickled down through the centuries, only to be misunderstood by murderers and power freaks and oppressors.

You don't have to be young and fiery to feel that kind of anger these days, but finding a way past it can be a tortuous journey. Jasper crams that into a few short pages -- then reality turns inside-out.

"Gunning" exhibits wit as well as anger. In other stories horror meets its near-twin, absurdity. "Goddamn Redneck Surfer Zombies" is just what it sounds like, and when the would-be dieters in "A Feast at the Manor" go on a two-week "vacation"/make-over in a sinister Arizona hotel where even the garden cacti make the hero feel "like a balloon in a room full of needles," nastiness and silliness are joined at the hip. Real and surreal meet to produce barbed social satire in "Visions of Suburban Bliss", while "Unplugged" achieves an added measure of poignancy as it shows cyberpunk "cowboys" in their days of obsolescence.

Turning to real or mythic pasts, Jasper juxtaposes bits of odd but genuine Americana with the metaphysical in "The Disillusionist" and older magic in "Coal Ash and Sparrows" (a powerful work which "started as an outtake" from a YA fantasy novel-in-progress and makes me eager to see the final product). While "An Outrider's Tale" (the one original) leaves the New World for the realms of a retold fairy tale with some clever twists, final story "Natural Order" returns to something like America, where an endless Road Trip beautifully mingles the familiar with the strange.

I've left the heart of the book (literally and figuratively) for last. If expanded, this sequence of four stories about the aliens known as Wannoshay or Wantas -- near-humanoids marooned on a near-future Earth, rather than bug-eyed invaders -- could form an excellent "mosaic novel"; even as a "mini-mosaic" it's intense. In the Introduction John Kessel calls these stories a "means of examining the middle American character" (and human nature in general), where the Wantas may become victims yet remain too unfathomable, and somehow dangerous, to perceive as "total innocents." When Jasper shows the interactions between Americans and these Others at various points, from attempted assimilation to corruption and incarceration, we see individuals caught up in what may be an inevitable historical process. The two stories set after the relationship has gone sour, "Mud and Salt" and "Crossing the Camp", are particularly powerful, though "Crossing" turns out to have been written before any of the others. When Jasper reveals this in the story comments gathered in his Afterward, he calls writing it a "watershed moment" and admits that it's his favorite. He has a shrewd eye for what's best among his works, and his enthusiasm for the writer's profession is engaging. While this world may seem darker and more dystopian by the day, avid, talented newcomers like Jasper help us keep the faith.