Book Review: John Reed’s ‘Tales of Woe’
Tales of Woe (2010)
Written by John Reed
Published by MTV Press
Street Date: August 17, 2010
Review by Marc Patterson
Here’s something I rarely admit but might as well just come clean with now: I don’t really read books anymore. I was an English major in college and have a library of books any literary aficionado would be proud of. Hell, I’ve even had some of my own fiction published. But ever since I started writing film reviews I stopped reading books, at least at the rate I used to. Now I’ll read one or two books a year… tops. When the folks from MTV Press approached me to review John Reed’s new book Tales of Woe I hesitated and I almost passed on it. I considered finding someone else to review it. But these folks did one thing no other book publisher has done – they sent me a preview of the book online. And so, with much trepidation I clicked on through, and was almost instantly sucked right into this incredible book. I immediately went back and said that yes, I would take a review copy, and for the first time in my reviewing history – I had them send the book to me.
Tales of Woe is a collection of twenty-five of the most disturbing, bizarre, fucked-up and twisted tales you might ever read, and the catch? They’re all true. Yes, Virginia, truth is stranger than fiction. I’ll take some fava beans and a bottle of chianti over this trip any day. (But I’m glad I took the red pill.)
John Reed delivers these stories with a pointed and punctuated sense of delivery that reads as if it were William Burroughs delivering the 6 pm news. Factual. Concise. Pithy. Bothersome. Really, really bothersome. My preference was to take my time and read these one at a time. I’d allow some time and space between stories so that I could really absorb each essay. Then I’d find some way to douche my brain in a mostly futile attempt to cleanse the mental palate before I dove into the next story.
So at this point you’re probably dying to know what the hell kind of stories these are. What is so twisted and perverse, and so TRUE that even the editor of a horror blog walks away feeling a little sickened. Let’s take a sneak peek at a couple of stories…
Bouncing Baby Baboony tells the twisted tale of a baboon who sneaks into a South African home and steals a sleeping baby only to devour its brain. This brief description does no justice to the actual telling of the story that is interspersed with facts you’d never know about baboon behavior, and quite frankly I don’t want to tell you more.
Bureaucrat’s Book of Death tells the tale of a mother who needed to urgently travel to the United States for an emergency surgery for her newborn son, who suffered from a hole in his heart. A simple procedure in the United States. Not so easy in Samoa. The story that ensues is a political nightmare of red tape, government idiocy, and 
injustice. Each of these stories are filled with statistics and facts that augment the horror of the stories being told, indicating that in most cases these aren’t simply isolated incidents, but one story of many. All of them tragic and sad, and many involving children.
The final story we’ll look at here is Elixir of Albino: The Unpigmented Alimentive. This story takes a look at a string of murders that took place (and are likely still taking place), in Tanzania where albinos were being murdered, supposedly by witch doctors, and harvested for their body parts which would be used in a variety of potions. Again, this is only the tip of the iceberg for this story. The real horror is that none of these stories are taking place fifty or a hundred years ago. These incidents are current, but you’ll never read about them in the news. These kind of stories aren’t the ones media machines owned by big business want on the evening news.
As you can see, beside each of these write-ups are some amazing works of art. The book itself is a small hardbound book. All pages are printed on thick high quality black paper and each story is illustrated with some stunning artwork from artists such as Stephane Blanquet, Patrick McQuade, and 8Pussy, each of which can be seen above. All said – eleven of today’s most original artists. We’re told that Reed reviewed over three-thousand artists’ work in order to find just the right kind of illustration work that evoked the pre-comic code art of the 30’s. I don’t know much about pre-comic code art of the 30’s, but I do know evocative work when I see it, and this book is chock full of it.
Tales of Woe is nearly two hundred pages of strange and twisted tragedy without even the slightest inclination to serve up a single happy ending. It’s a sickening look at the horrors of real life from around the globe, and while I’m hesitant to recommend it, I have a feeling I pretty much just have.
Artist Credits:
Bouncing Baby Baboony by Patrick McQuade
Bureaucrat’s Book of Death by 8Pussy
Elixir of Albino by Stephane Blanquet
