Blowing Up by Biff Mitchell – 5 Star Review

Welcome to the World You Live In.

Welcome to one of the April 5th stops on the blog tour for Blowing Up by Biff Mitchell with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, more reviews, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

Please note that this post contains affiliate links, which means there is no additional cost to you if you shop using my links, but I will earn a small percentage in commission. A program-specific disclaimer is at the bottom of this post.

About the Book

Blowing Up
by Biff Mitchell

Published 21 October 2021
Fiction4All / Double Dragon

Genre: Short Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Page Count: 264
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

Welcome to the World You Live In.

It’s a mess. It’s diseased, polluted, over-populated and too close to the sun. But it’s all we have and we’re losing it fast, so we may as well have a good laugh before the sun reaches out and reclaims us.

In Blowing Up, Biff Mitchell shakes the foundations of a world gone bad with outrageous dollops of inappropriate humor. Nothing is sacred, nothing is spared. Nothing is safe in a world accumulating too much ammunition for too few targets.

So welcome to Mitchell’s world of ghosts who have to get the last word, ball-busting muses who torture for the hell of it, a woman who sheds rabbits from her eyes instead of tears, an office of petty-minded workers fused together in a nuclear holocaust and a world where you write grammatically correct essays or starve to death.

But there will be laughter.

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Excerpt

From Still Life with Sax and Muse

(Published in Rose & Thorn Literary Journal. 2014)

It was a quiet afternoon at Molly’s Cafe. Outside, gray rain sliced through the air like tiny hatchets. Behind us, a lone sax player ground out something bluesy with all the gravel and grit of a break-hardened heart. Across from me, Jo’s eyes, as usual, were green, a green that could feed forests.

She wore a black turtleneck with matching black tights divided by a red swatch of tartan skirt. I tried to keep my eyes on her eyes, but the green threatened to swallow my soul and toss me around in the tides of her green forever. I focused my eyes on a couple of dust motes arguing about semantics and existentialism somewhere in that distance between her green eyes and her long legs, those legs that flowed up into an unimaginable playground, into … I refocused my eyes on the dust motes.

“Do you like my sweater?” she said.

“Huh?” I said.

“Do you like my sweater? You haven’t taken your eyes off it. Are you thinking dirty thoughts again, you pathetic literary pig?”

Damn dust motes, arguing right in front of her breasts.

“Oh, uh … yeah. Nice sweater.” The plan was to be cool. “I’ve always liked large sweaters,” I said.

The plan wasn’t working.

The two dust motes were cooler than I was.

She smiled. “You’re blushing, pig.”

“Something caught in my eye.”

“And it’s cutting off your air supply, goat?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said. “Air supply.”

“How’s life … boar?” she said.

“I haven’t slept in three days,” I said. “I drink too much. I can’t write anything anymore. I dream about grabbing spoons and stabbing people. I found God rummaging through the bottles and boxes in my medicine cabinet. He looked hungry and confused. There’s a dead rat in my refrigerator. It sees everything. Its whiskers quiver. It asked me where I go.” I slumped my head.

“I don’t know where I go.” I looked up past Jo’s black sandals and black forever legs and dazzling tartan and past those damned pretentious motes and into the deep green seas of her eyes. “Other than that, I’m fine. And you?”

“I made love to John Lennon last night.”

I nodded. “Big night.”

My Review

My Rating: 5 Stars
Consider liking my review on Goodreads

I was granted complimentary access to Blowing Up by Biff Mitchell as part of my participation in a blog tour for this title with Goddess Fish Promotions. Thank you to all involved in affording me this opportunity! My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

Blowing Up is a collection of short fiction stories that sprinkles absurd humour and surreal observations into horrifying situations. I thoroughly enjoyed the ride! I absolutely loved the attention to visual details throughout, and I loved being left scratching my head at the end of several of these stories.

The stories are a nice mix of first and third-person POVs and each presents very different lead characters with just enough time to get to know them. Some are barely a few pages long and end before you know it, while others feel like novelettes, and some feel like they could be explored further into a novella or novel.

I adore the titles! Titles like “100 People, 10 Bats, and 1 Cat Blowing Up” really piqued my curiosity and the story that followed did not disappoint.

Like most short fiction anthologies, I’m left feeling like nothing was long enough and I want more, but these are good feelings! I understand the point of short fiction, these are written very well, and they’re just as long as they need to be. I just want more!

About the Author

Biff Mitchell is a speculative fiction/humor writer living in Atlantic Canada. He’s managed to trick publishers and editors on three continents into publishing his novels and shorts stories. For ten years, he tortured aspiring writers with his Writing Hurts Like Hell workshop taught through the University of New Brunswick.

Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Amazon | Goodreads

Giveaway Alert!

Biff Mitchell will be awarding an autographed copy of Murder by Burger to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

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