Free Taste Of Tenderloin Authored By Gene ONeill Offered As Kindle

Taste of Tenderloin, by Gene ONeil is a series of eight stories, which all take place in the Tenderloin district.
The Tenderloin district is the roughest neighborhood in San Francisco and one could find plenty for real tales that take place here that could raise the hairs on the back of your neck, but Mr.
ONeil takes it a step further and adds an element of the supernatural to each of his stories.

His stories range from down and out drunks and drug addicts, to people who have already given up on life.
The common thread of desperation clings to each tale and they are all set against the backdrop of poverty and hair trigger violence.
Before you are twenty pages into the book, you realize that the Tenderloin is no place that anyone wants to find themselves in.

Despite the gloomy backdrop, many of ONeils stories revolve around the concept of redemption, I found these the most interesting, What would a drunk do if he suddenly lost the compulsion to drink What would it take for a junky to set down his needle Would each high sending him into a horrible nightmare be enough
These supernatural twists on addiction were fresh and interesting new concepts and not your standard horror far.
Overall I found the book and its stories inventive, entertaining, and often quite disturbing,
Spooky and creepy, right from the start! I recently met Gene ONeill at a Brian Keene signing event in San Francisco and he may be one of the nicest people I have ever met.
He was gracious enough to speak with me for a while and talk books, which was super cool.
I felt bad though because I had never read his work, so I had to remedy that immediately.
Glad I did too, because, in addition to being a really genuine, nice guy, he can also write terrific stories.
If you can call the tales in Taste of the Tenderloin, terrific, Maybe a better description would be, extremely well written and bleak, These stories of the desperate conditions and people of the tenderloin put the dark in dark fiction.


Since I go into San Francisco for work on occasion I am familiar with the tenderloin areas that Gene describes so well in his stories.
You can smell the body odor, stale piss and Night Train on the pages, That was a compliment, btw, Every big city has these parts where the forgotten or just plain rotten hang out and live.
Most suffering from mental illness that they try and selfmedicate with drugs and booze, Talking to themselves and trying to keep their distance, or worse yet, trying to get too close.
It is a tragic, strange, and brutal place, Thats life in the loin, And thats the stories that you will find herein, If youre looking for feel good, redemptive tales, then this may not be your bag, If youre looking for the “dark” in dark fiction, then you should pick this one up, Not a sour short in the bunch,
Good, weird, damaged. Back in the mids, I went to San Francisco for a week and stayed at a hotel in the Union Square area.
I did a lot of walking and wandered into a nearby seedy area while I was trying to find The Great American Music Hall where I planned to see McCoy Tyner in concert later that night.
I was fascinated by the worndown vibes of the area, Even the bums were interesting, I also managed to find a dynamite German restaurant that knew how to make a mean schnitzel.
I told a friend I spent most of the day wandering in what I was told was the Tenderloin District, she screamed, "YOU WHAT!" According to her, I was lucky to still be alive.


I've gone back there during my occasional trips to San Francisco and, while I'm a lot more cautious, I still think it is one of more interesting areas of the city.
The Tenderloin has bravely resisted urban gentrification and still has incredible eating places, now mostly Vietnamese since part of the Tenderloin is now called Little Saigon.
There are some good places to hear music and, for you seedy people, the notorious Mitchell Brothers strip joint is still going strong.
I've never set foot in the place myself, Honestly! But the real attraction of the Tenderloin is that its dirty streets still evoke the sleazy charm of Dashiell Hammett's gritty detective stories.


Gene O'Neill seems to like the Tenderloin as much as I do, He wrote a collection of eight loosely connected short stories about the area and its residents, All fall into the supernatural/horror genre yet it is the author's detail to characterization that set the tales apart.
Each story is a character study of the unfortunate personalities that make the Tenderloin their home, Hookers, Drug Addicts, smalltime cons, All are given a sensitive but honest appraisal by the author, This is a very downbeat book, grim and realistic despite its supernatural plots, Gene O'Neill has written a very different set of horror tales but he is also deserving of recognition as a notable regional writer of the Bay Area.
I understand he has some novels that take place in the same area, I will be checking them out, Having visited San Francisco, and its infamous Tenderloin, this book caught my eye, That district has a distinctive air of desperation and damage, and I hoped that Mr ONeill would be able to capture it.


Well he has, Perfectly.

This attractive little book from Apex Publications containsexceptional tales all set in the Tenderloin in which we meet some interesting and broken people.
My favourites included Tombstones in his Eyes, in which an addict attempts to hoodwink a terrifying new dealer on the block.
Balance features an obsessed Vietnam vet on a homicidal mission of restoring order to the world, In Bushido, a hideously scarred homeless man meets Samurai culture in a story of guilt and redemption.
Ill also mention The Apotheosis of Nathan McKee, Here, a middleaged drunk discovers he has powers of invisibility in a tale with a rare lighthearted tone.
But there isnt a single weak link in this collection,


With such a niche theme, I feared it could become samey, On the contrary, while the flavour and atmosphere of the Tenderloin is present throughout, I actually yearned for more once the last story was concluded.
The evocation is so strong, I could smell the trash, feel the drugsweat against my skin, taste the Wild Irish Rose whiskey.


There are several recurring characters, such as the legless bum Short Stuff, and Sweet Jane, the prostitute who features upon the beautiful cover.
They provide a very human and reassuring familiarity to the deprivation, But it is the loin itself that is the antihero of the book, a character in itself.


Even if urban, superntural horror is not to your taste, I would still recommend Taste of Tenderloin.
It is written in a leisurely, uncluttered style that engages immediately whether the tales begin with a bang or a whisper.
Gene ONeill has presented us with a small but perfectly formed fictionalisation of one of the western worlds most fascinating city districts, and the lost souls that populate it.
Enjoy.

This is a very good collection of eight horror/fantasy stories set in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.
The stories are tenuously linked thematically and by some recurring supporting characters and settings, The attention to the character of the downandout protagonists is quite well done, treating the addicts, prostitutes, alcoholics, and other lost souls with respect and affording them some dignity.
I particularly liked Bruised Soul, an unreliablenarrator story featuring an exboxer Balance, with its possiblydelusional veteran hero and the invisible man story, The Apotheosis of Nathan McKee.
It's a dark and depressing book, but does have a thread of nobility and hopefulness running through it.
Read my review at FeoAmante, com: sitelink feoamante. com/Stories/Revi I got this because it won a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Collection, I wanted to read some decent horror and this is set in the Tenderloin which contains some of my favorite areas in San Francisco.
In particular I love the theatre district where many theatres rub up against dive bars and strip clubs in an uneasy alliance.
There are some cool buildings here and Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon, The Tenderloin is its place, not cleaned up and prettified for the tourists and the yuppies San Francisco needs more of that, frankly, otherwise it just feels like a big clean amusement park.


The stories in this were just okay for me, There were too many stories that were more or less the same story and I found that irritating.
I actually preferred the brief mention of various recurring Tenderloin characters to the actual stories, It was all too predictable for me, Also bothersome were some repeated inaccuracies, mainly that Wild Irish Rose is whiskey, It's not whiskey it's heavily fortified wine, I know this because it was liquor of choice for many of the hardcore alcoholics that frequented the Walgreen's in the Student Ghetto in Albuquerque.
They drank it every day of the week except for

Sundays when alcohol wasn't sold and they bought and drank Listerine.


This wasn't terrible, it was just too repetitious for me to really enjoy it, but it has its moments.
Not terrible, not great just okay, Despite the flavorful title, Gene O' Neill's Taste of Tenderloin doesn't feature eight stories dedicated to culinary tales, but instead it's his ode to the San Francisco Tenderloin District, bent on making the area a vivid, magical place all its own.


The first story, “Lost Patrol”, is not necessarily a traditional story with a beginning, middle and end.
Instead it's a character profile, short, but vivid, with a delicate stretch of story surrounding it, Like an appetizer, there's not much here, but enough to get a good taste of what's to come.


Next comes “Magic Words”, an old school urban fantasy tale of dark magic and a mysterious homeless woman who one night, taking only a promise for the future as payment, gives a man the exact words he needed to move forward in his life.
Unlike a lot of other stories, this one doesn't try to present a “be careful what you ask for” moral.
Instead it just presents itself as it is, adding an element of mysticism to the Tenderloin,

“Tombstones in His Eyes” tackles the overlapping tales of the junkies on the street, using some very interesting symbolism.
Again, O' Neill doesn't so much tell a story as present a character and their tale, in the good and bad, for the reader's viewing.


“Bushido” is also lovely, the tale of a man who finds salvation in the streets walking alongside doom.
But the imagery and the climax bear a strong resemblance to the previous tale, and so it lessens some of the impact.


“Balance” follows a vet suffering from a disconnect with reality, It's hard to watch Declan's version of getting more control over the world around him, since he can't seem to control his own brain functions.
But this story, like the other so far, is present unflinchingly, with little effort to make the reader sympathize with the characters.
Instead O' Neill just beckons you to come and listen,

With “The Apotheosis of Nathan McKee” O'Neill ties the people of the Tenderloin and the stories in this collection together firmly, making each minor, barely mentioned character the owner of their own story.
Nathan, interchangeable with the attack victim in “Bushido”, discovers a beating has left him not only for with a complete lack of desire for the booze he used to drug himself, but it's given him a unique ability.
Only he's not quite sure what to do with it, The first overall positive tale, without a bittersweet touch, it possesses a delicate aspect of intriguing urban fantasy.


In “Bruised Soul” Mickey D, an ex boxer abandoned to the streets by time and suffering from damage taken through the length of his career, hits the streets after a stint in a mental facility, only to discover the good things have gotten that much worse in his absence and the bad things, of course, never change.
It's his new neighbor that piques his interest this time around, an exotic woman named Jenna who seems to have a peculiar ability.
Threaded just as finely is an end question, what is real and what has Micky D imagined, without the heavyhandedness of other stories.


Finally is “”, the first first person story in the collection, Here the lead might not seem like a true member of the Tenderloin, but by the sad, shattering end of this cop's life you can see every character story so far caught up in this one tale.


Readers should be warned that these characters seem fleshy and real, their tales often dark and hopeless.
It is easy to get pulled into the hopeless feeling of this collection,

Taste of Tenderloin is a tight network of precise details and emotion presented, but firmly held back from influencing the reader in each story.
A delicate balance of realism, surrealism and unique storytelling makes it a compelling read,
.