What Is This? Some say life’s a path winding through a forest of endless possibilities. Well…we’ll see. In the meantime, Crazy Man and the dog, Sidestepper, will be following that path through the deep dark scary woods every Tuesday and Thursday in a twice weekly saga of their journey.    

And who are Crazy Man and the dog, Sidestepper?    I’m not sure. I’m still learning.     Crazy Man was under his bed with an empty bottle of wine for a long time before he decided to look into “this outside thing.” His body exists in one dimension and his mind in another and he’s never been sure which is which. Once on the path, the past begins to slip away and he can’t remember if he has a kitchen or not. Or a garage.     

The dog, Sidestepper, is looking for the mother who abandoned him when he was a puppy, causing his body to stay the same size and his legs to grow into long skinny stilts that make him look strangely like an egret nest perched on top of power lines. But don’t think about that…you’ll dream. It won’t be nice.  And he walks sideways. Always.    After a short confrontational greeting during which Crazy Man assures the dog, Sidestepper, that he’s not his mother, the two decide to travel together down the path of adventure and new meanings through the deep dark scary woods.    

What awaits them will change their already weird lives into…well…something weirder. You’re welcome to join them on their journey every Wednesday but, be warned, nothing good can come of this. 

5 out of 5  

“There’s a lot of crap out there, and shit falls out of the sky, but not on me. I’m the source of my own crap and people respect me for that. I’m like the faucet I can’t turn off. Wordsworth’s spontaneous overflow without the meter. I’m a damn flood.” 

This quote, the second paragraph in Biff Mitchell’s collection of short stories, could perhaps be taken as a summary of the book as a whole. I don’t mean to suggest that Blowing Up is crap – quite the opposite – but this bit captures the author’s fluency of expression as well as his penchant for self-denigration. His stories are simultaneously shocking and funny, literate and profane, a riot of cynical creativity brightened by occasional flashes of compassionate insight. 

I chose to review this book because I know it’s difficult to find readers for short fiction. I didn’t have any expectations, which is fortunate, because this volume would have violated them – whatever they were. Blowing Up doesn’t fit well into any category. A mixture of satire and science fiction, spiritual pondering and scatological polemics, the book is utterly original.

 Review by Lisabet Sarai, Goodreads Reviewer (Blog: Beyond Romance) 

These are novels, short fiction and a book on how to write novels.  

I write mostly cyberpunk, magical realism and humor.  

Everything else was written by another Biff. 

I have reviews for some of them here (click the titles to download the reviews):

The Weekly Man

The War Bug

Team Player

Shown above is the cover of one of  the Boston Jonson cyber mysteries...Murder by Coffee.