Smoke Follows Beauty

By Brian Ames

From the depths of comfortably dim forest on the Eastern slopes of Washington's Cascades Mountains comes Smoke Follows Beauty, a short fiction collection from emerging author Brian Ames. With a distinctly rural sense of place and unforgettable characters, Smoke Follows Beauty takes readers along the hunt for wonder whose game is satisfaction. These tales echo those meant to be spoken around the half-light of campfires, and seeks to restore a needed measure of awe and mystery to life, so lacking in our 21st century existence. The books offers eclectic subject matter - from hunting to horse-shoeing, rescue to unprecedented disaster, colonial Africa, a mountain elk-hunting blind, a bar down the street, to a pleasant apocalypse. Smoke Follows Beauty engages an exploration of the spiritual, paranormal, metaphysical - in the darkest, most ancient parts of the forest, where vapors gather, rise, take shape.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1929763107
• ISBN13: 9781929763108
• Release Date: December 2015
• Publisher: Pocol Press
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Brian Ames: The New Voice in American Literature

Attention literati--the search is over! You want a legitimate American voice in fiction? Brian Ames has arrived.Have you searched for the writer that would inspire and energize like Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald did, way back when and even still? The new Carver or Cheever or Vonnegut, a writer with wit and guts and profound pain and wild colors outside the lines? Your search is over.Brian Ames offers an eloquent voice to rise above the shrill, slick chorus of American letters today in his superb short story collection, "Smoke Follows Beauty." Cerebral, classic narrative? Superbly mournful characterizations? Wild-ass rock and roll in actual text form? Playful plots with just a touch of painfully, compassionately offered cruelty? You want poetry, you want hard rock, you want red-neck and knee jerk, you want sweet kindness and compassion, love and hate, all deftly portrayed, sometimes in gritty black and white, sometimes in pastels that make you weep with gratitude? Search no more. Ames is the real deal.In "Smoke Follows Beauty," Brian Ames displays not only a mastery of the genre, but a startling breadth of theme and mood that makes the book a roller-coaster ride of the heart. The collection works superbly as a series of experiences for the reader, but also creates--or reflects--a world that puzzles, moves, disturbs and enthralls. Superlatives, superlatives. There are very few good books, books you would really ask a broke friend to buy anyway. Well, this is one of them. Watch out for Ames, because there is more to come, or so Ames says when I sent him an e-mail raving about this book. American fiction deserves writers like this who can cut to the psychological chase, offer up stories that kill, stories that make us--that's right MAKE us!--feel what we have a right to feel, and do it all unpretentiously, artfully, gorgeously, with extreme cool.Read "Memory of Hard Rain" and tell me it isn't the best short story you've ever read. C'mon, I dare ya! Read about hunting, read about forest myth, read about being a tired middle ager or a hopelessly hopeful adolescent--it is all here in "Smoke Follows Beauty." But do read it, because exceptional authors are in short supply these days, and great writers are fewer still, and I imagine that most readers (like me) had to stumble upon Brian Ames. He has the stuff. Buy this book, and keep the dream alive for a literature in this country that kicks [butt]! And keep an eye out for the next book by Brian Ames!

An superb weaving of man and Nature

In SMOKE FOLLOWS BEAUTY, Mr. Ames stirred me with his excellent, descriptive writing as he shared the thoughts and experiences of a hunter as he blends into Nature's world in search of elk. The first story, "Listen," captured me immediately with "The language of trees, utterances of fir and maple, the soft hum and sigh and clearing of the pine's throat. An opinion offered from cedars." It was a great start for the book, describing the world of the forest, drawing the reader into what we consider to be a retreat for peace and silence, not a place for lessons to be learned. I was impressed the author's range of knowledge--how he incorporated it into the stories and added depth, and with the variety of stories and their details. I appreciated the stillness of these tales, the insight, wisdom, and perspective gained from the woods juxtaposed with the rural, "civilized" world.His stories were creatively and aptly titled, all fascinating and sometimes profound, segments of a whole. I loved the language in this book, combined with the author's careful thoughtfulness. His exquisite language and extraordinary metaphors just blew me away. Wordsmithing at its best.

Prose or poetry

Brian Ames' prose and skillful use of powerfully descriptive words paint pictures for the ready much like really good poetry does. When reading about his characters' adventures in the outdoors, you can feel the connection the author has with nature. If you have spent time in the wild, especially if it was in a solitary pursuit of any kind, you will love this book. Once you have read a few of his stories, you will have an overpowering urge to venture forth into the woods and finishing reading the book while lying under the branches the nearest tree. Not a bad way to spend you time, if you ask me.

A review of SMOKE FOLLOWS BEAUTY

Brian Ames' collection of short stories entitled SMOKE FOLLOWS BEAUTY is a work to be savored. While most of the stories are fairly short, they are also deep, so that the reader feels compelled to read each story twice, once for the pure enjoyment of reading a well-written story, and a second time to look for the meaning that lies therein, thus the stories make the reader think as well as enjoy. Most of the stories are set in the Northwestern United States, in natural settings, mostly woodlands. Mr. Ames is obviously an outdoorsman, one who has a deep love of nature, and his love of nature is reflected in the beauty of his words. For example, he describes the approach of a rain wall thusly: "It assembled itself like the weaving of a moist blanket over the rise of the river, dropping from low altocumulus onto round mounds of hills." His description of a woodland sunrise is just as striking: "Dawn is breaking, sunrise evolving bands of orange and pink, the pink flying from light and overcome by gold, then gray, as overcast settles the east." What Mr. Ames does is describe the beauties of nature not just so the reader can envision them but so that the reader feels as though he or she is actually there, seeing and feeling and enjoying what the narrator of the story is experiencing. There's a lot of Hemingway in the stories, not only in the way a love of nature comes through, but in the details that only one who has experienced and enjoyed life in the wilds could express them. Like Hemingway himself, Mr. Ames truly has a way with words.