The SLUSHPILE Blog

Review Date: January 11, 2008

Rating:

Souls of Steel - Philip Garrow - self-published through AmErica House. - 381 pages - soft cover

Market Analysis:

Amazon sellers best price: $10.99. Total retail cost per page: $0.028.

If this were printed on demand: cost per page: $0.013 = $4.95 to print + .90 per cover = Total print cost of $5.85. The List price is (I think) $16.99 - 55% wholesale discount = $7.64 - total print cost of 5.85 = $1.79 profit margin per book.

Book ranking as of 9/16/07: 3,159,155. Approximate Amazon Sales between 1 to 5 books a year if this remains consistent in that ranking area. So the publisher net income is between $1.79 and $8.95 a year through Amazon. This of course does not include books sold through other outlets.

Review:

Souls of Steel is an engrossing if frustrating read.   

Reading more like an autobiography than a novel, it focuses heavily on Thaddeus (Tad) Gallow and his young bride Laura. Tad begins his life in the steel mills by taking a summer job before going back to college. He finds an unexpected passion for the work, and his wife finds an unexpected fondness for the very good money Tad brings in. When fall comes, Tad takes the ’short-cut’ of skipping college. After all, they both reason, why put themselves into debt to get an education when he’s making money equal to or better than anything he’s likely to make even after getting a degree?

So starts their journey stemming from a short-sighted decision of convenience. The consequences of his choice are brought home to him shortly after signing on as a permanent worker in this passage from page 94 where he enters the locker room for the first time now that the ‘boys of summer’ are gone:

 October’s final moments. A cool Monday morning, heavy with honey dew; earth held soft in the last leaf fall of Pennsylvania’s kaleidoscope autumn panorama. Tad strode — senses sharpened — humming a piece from Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Karn Evil Nine. He manuevered around abandoned lockers — doors swung open in silent sayanora to the boys of summer, gone ’til faroff spring. Tad cruised along, dressing without a thought in his pleasantly blank mind, when — out of the blue — an ice berg realization struck his hull jagged. What’m I doin’ here? Tad quit dressing and looked about — his eyes open for the first time since he crossed the railroad tracks in May. A frightful rush of senselessness washed over him. He knew none of the men dressing about him — faces strange hostile gray old haggard. The Powder Puff was dark, lost, and filthy. The bright college boys were gone. Long gone. Tad was run through with pain. There’s no escape. The remodeling loans, the classes at Cal, the Family, the marriage have sealed my fate. Every minute-a the next thirty years-a my life’s gonna be served behind the barbed wire an’ brick walls-a Allenport Penitentiary. He couldn’t breathe. His pulse raced. His heart pounded in his temples. He grew so dizzy he had to lean against the locker. . .

The above passage highlights both the best and some of the worst of Garrow’s writing. The best points are that his imagery is great, his epiphanies highly felt. The downside is that the reader is constantly distracted by the writer and the choices he made on how to present his subject. The book is filled with sentence fragments, wierd capitilizations (not just a few, but everywhere) and a constant shifting from the first to third person and then back again. It has a ’stream of consciousness’ writing style in which the author strings together a list of adjectives with no commas between to suffice for description, causing entire sentences that are incoherent and maddening in trying to decipher what the author means. The author uses phonetics to convey speech patterns, but then carries this throughout the narrative also, which detracts greatly from the read.

Despite all of these problems, I found it an enjoyable book. My interest did not stem so much from the story written down, but the true story going on behind the pages: a college drop out facing the realization that his life is going to be spent in the steel mills, that his marriage and financial obligations have now sealed his fate, and using writing as a tool to rescue the creative side of himself from wilting away. In this light, it is no wonder that the author made over-the-top choices in his writing. He used his brightest, most jarring colors to paint a picture in an otherwise very drab world.

Souls of Steel appears to be the authors first book, and as it is copyrighted 1999, it is a shame that he has never apparently written another. A second work with far more discipline and much less desperation would probably be a fantastic read.

I can’t recommend this title for everyone, however. I would limit it to these people:

• Those who have an interest in the steel industry from a blue-collar perspective.
• Those who are interested in Western Pennsylvania culture and history.
• Those who are willing to take a wide detour out of the normal standards of writing and tackle something that stretches the written word to its very limits.
• Those who are interested in writing and want to see a whole collection of what not to do in a book.
• Those who want to read a story that has an entire collection of what not to do in a book, and have it still work (which in and of itself is an incredibly rare feat).

If you fit into any of the above categories, you will not find this read a waste of time, and, indeed, it may be time well spent in terms of expanding your perspective on writing. Alas, this is never going to be a mass-market read, or even a really suitable read for those that it was supposedly written for (the men and women who lived the steel-industry era). The mental acrobatics required in order to follow the story are certain to discourage all but the most agile of readers.

Rating:

This book was forwarded to me to be reviewed by a friend of the author.