I had no idea what to expect when I picked up My Life in Heavy Metal, but the premise of short stories centered on love, sex and relationships and its many foibles seemed interesting. This is a very quirky and earnest collection that made me laugh and reminded me what it was like to be naive and inexperienced when it came to love and sex during my teens and early twenties. But it also deals with the aforementioned issues with older characters as well. The stories spoke to me as well as entertained me. My favorite stories are "How to Love a Republican," "Run Away, My Pale Love," "Geek Player, Love Slayer," "The Pass," and "Pornography." All of the stories center on relationships and the protagonists are all flawed in some way or another. "Geek Player, Love Slayer" is the best story of the bunch, in my opinion. I was able to identify with the female protagonist and the story is poignant to boot. So, if you like short stories that deal with love and sex angst, then you will love My Life in Heavy Metal. Steve Almond is a talented author and I look forward to reading more of his stuff.

Steve Almond's short-story collection opens with a first-person narrative about a recent college grad, out on his own writing heavy metal show reviews for a local newspaper while he's torn between two girls. I was instantly won over by this man who refused to attend his live-in girlfriend's best friend's wedding because it was on the date of not just any show, but the Guns N' Roses show. Any 80's music fan could understand that decision! Given the title of the book, I assumed this story was autobiographical and more of the same would follow. Imagine my surprise to meet a brash 33-year old female narrator in the second story, at which point I realized this was a story collection, not a series of personal essays.

All of Almond's stories focus on relationships--on cheating, on unrequited love, on Don Juan bar hoppers who have a new girl every night, on loving foreign graduate students and following them back to Poland, on workplace crushes, on come-ons in bars, and so on. Some are three pages long while others are dozens of pages and span a time period of months in a relationship. None are the same, so Almost is to be admired for creating unique narrative voices for such a wide range of characters. Some are so engrossing that the reader is saddened to leave the characters, while others don't really strike the mark.

If you want to explore people's motivations and behaviors in love, lust, settling, pursuing, and the like, pick this up. If you are a heavy metal fan, read the opening essay and move on.

Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove, 2002)

To start off with the weak point of Steve Almond's story collection: there's really nothing here you haven't seen before. Almond's stories are the kind of slice-of-life nothing-happens stories written by, it seems, every author on the planet who's written a word at any point past 1983. This has a tendency to make them light reading at best, predictable and boring at worst.

The strong point, on the other hand, is Almond's sense of voice. Each of these stories contains a narrator with an exceptionally distinctive voice. This may be masked by the voice of the narrator of the title story (the first in the collection), who's just a regular guy. But after a couple more, you start to realize how different the characters' voices are from one another, from the brash, unlikable office worker who narrates "Geek Player, Love Slayer," to the interior voice of the narrator of "The Pass," whose voice will, in your head, sound exactly like the guy who narrated all those film strips you watched in grammar school science.

If plot is a literary device secondary to characterization for you, there will be a good deal to like for you in this collection. If you like your stuff primarily plot-driven, however, you may be best advised to look elsewhere. ***

I will be the first to admit, i hate books and reading, for the most part. Sure, i enjoyed catcher in the rye, the same book that every person, or at least every teenager, loves. But "My Life in Heavy Metal" became the first book that i ever bought, solely for my own enjoyment. Introduced to me through a college freshman writing class was the short story "How to Be a Republican," one of a collection of short stories in this book by Steve Almond. "How to be a Republican" is one of my favorite of the stories i have read so far from the collection, but i have not yet read them all. In all of the stories, the main character is Dave (Steve Almond) who is fighting between different forces of love (friendship, romance, and sex). These stories take you in with them. You become emotionally attached to characters, esp. Dave, wanting to help him all the time. The stories are very real, and sometimes graphic with their sensual imagery...il finish this later

This book was ok, dabbled with some clever turns of phrase and flashes of insight. However, it frankly got a little old that, regardless of the story's specifics, the narrator (a fella) was going to get some, and the lady was going to fall for him, hard.

I mean, I'm happy Mr. Almond is so successful with the ladies, but when that's the only message that's reliably communicated in each story, it becomes the opposite of edgy. that is, dull.