Don’t take Tod Goldberg’s OTHER RESORT CITIES as some fun-loving travelogue. These 10 stories are populated with people who live in resort towns, but they are not what the local chamber of commerce wants you to see.
I had read the story “Mitzvah,” dealing with a rabbi in Las Vegas before in the LAS VEGAS NOIR anthology, but the other nine were all new to me, even though some have been printed in different forms. The one unifying connection between them is just how dark of a writer Goldberg really is. These are no media tie-ins, folks (although he does those well).
The book opens with “The Salt,” about a cop reflecting on his past as he watches the local police dragging bodies from the Salton Sea. “Walls” involves a grown adult telling the story of his youth and the men who entered his mother’s life, be they good,bad or just plain ugly. It’s never fully explained who the narrator is speaking to, but he sure is full of venom as he recounts the events of her mistreatment.
Two tales feature the same characters, and each tell somewhat of the same story. The first is “Palm Springs,” in which Tania, who has made a life working in resort towns such as Vegas and now Palm Springs, remembers the time she adopted a girl from Russia who, five years later, ran away, never to be seen again.
Tania is revisited in “Other Resort Cities,” which goes into detail about the whole adoption process of bringing the girl over from Russia, learning along the way that even though what she thinks she is doing right, her adoptive daughter would have much rather been left alone. These stories are truly haunting, and Goldberg does a masterful job of pulling the reader into this woman’s extremely lonely life.
He also adds a bit of surrealism into the book with “Living Room,” about a man whose wife and children have left him, by all accounts, so he decides to open a Starbucks in the middle of his home, even hiring a worker just to cater to himself. As surreal as it is, it only scratches the surface of what might really be going on in the narrator’s life.
“The Models” tells of a father trying his hardest to provide for his children, to the point of living in model homes for shelter, while in “Granite City,” the discovery of a family killed in a cabin tests what a sheriff will do to help out grieving relatives, even if it goes against the brutal truth.
“Will” is another piece of surrealism, in which a surviving son is thrown by the final wishes of his father’s will. Goldberg shows that this son must have really been a screw-up for the dad to put in these stipulations. “Rainmaker” is about a college professor and his second job. Those who watch BREAKING BAD will get a kick out of this one, as it shows the lengths some people will go to survive.
The people who populate these stories could totally exist in our society and probably some do. They are just like you and me, but with some truly twisted backstories. Some of these stories could be expanded into even further lengths. While I’d love to read more about these people, I definitely would not want to hang out with most of them. OTHER RESORT CITIES is an eye-opening look at life in today’s society, never sugarcoating its harsh reality. —Bruce Grossman
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• BURN NOTICE: THE END GAME by Tod Goldberg
• BURN NOTICE: THE FIX by Tod Goldberg
