Wound Ballistics [Hardcover]

Relationships between men and women, especially sexual ones, are subject to a veritable grocery list of the seven deadly sins, and few topics are more compelling to explore. Montreal-based author Steven Manners knows this, and in the 15 very short, very dark stories in Wound Ballistics, it's Mars and Venus all over again. Alas, Manners forgot a golden rule of fiction: people don't read simply for detail but to go somewhere, and so Wound Ballistics ends up being too little of a good thing. We get lots of colour and some fantastic turns of phrase: "I would like to believe that her words lie buried inside me, like old bones and bits of pottery in the earth beneath the nursing home," Manners writes in "Thinking I Would Remember Those Words Forever." But just as we feel momentum, the story ends, rendering all foreshadowing and detailed description useless. "That Last Day in Paris" and "Commitment" offer, respectively, beautiful scenery and eerie possibility, but neither is developed beyond mere suggestion. Also distracting are the facts that virtually every character smokes cigarettes and that Manners endlessly describes their skin-- it's alternately "cool as glass," "clammy to the touch," "paper smooth," and, well, you get the picture. There is no doubt that Manners has a way with words, but judging by the dearth of meat served up in Wound Ballistics, he has a way to go with plot. --Kim Hughes

Writers, like anyone else, can't be blamed for having a strong interest in how relationships begin and end. In Wound Ballistics, Steven Manners approaches relationships from these two different angles.
Manners often begins his stories with couples that have been together for some time. In "Journey with Maps", a couple is on a road trip, and the reader quickly discerns tension: "Ray nodded even though she wasn't looking." There are already poisoned feelings ("I should never have told you about that," Margaret said, "I should never tell you anything"), as well as a shared mythology:

"I'm an idiot when it comes to directions."
"You are. You are an idiot. I don't understand it."

We watch as the characters eventually stumble across the moment when the relationship quietly dissolves: "'You're not happy with me,' Ray said flatly, not really asking a question."
In "Mirror", we find a relationship that's ongoing, though the two characters stopped appreciating each other long ago: "I held her until she stirred uncomfortably. 'You're making me hot,' Mia complained." Manners inserts some vampire imagery here, implying that the relationship isn't healthy—a habit which no longer satisfies but which neither of the two is willing to break: "I press my mouth against hers, biting at her…" "Mia rubbed night cream onto her throat. Such a pretty throat."
Manners's stories go beyond the breakdown of relationships. His characters are conscious of chunks of time slipping away and of slow, eroding change. In the Manners collection even when a relationship does work out, things change, people die. "That Last Day in Paris" is heavy with sadness, the inevitability of time erasing memory: "On that last day in Paris they rented bicycles, or perhaps mopeds." Manners comes close to making the point too obvious, with the characters making comments like "Everything changes, all the time. We forget that. We forget that we were different once," and "Will you always remember this day?" Still, the story evokes a palpable sense of loss in the reader.
There are some extremely dark stories here as well. The title story, "Wound Ballistics", shows us a couple as close to their guns as they are to each other. In "Mouse", a man rants about the mouse he uses as an excuse for his habit of isolating himself: "Everything was finally getting back to the way it used to be. So you can understand how upset I was when the mouse appeared." This collection is complex and subtle in its attempt to come to grips with the futility of most of our attempts to make something out of life.
Alex Boyd (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

Wound Ballistics is a troubling coroner’s report on the moribund state of modern North American relationships. Each of the book’s 15 stories centre on fraying alliances between men and women. Manners could become a major voice here. -- Quill and Quire