The Gorko Gazette

ROLLING ON THE BOTTOM
BY WILSON KOEWING
COWBOY JAMBOREE PRESS, 2025
122 pages, $13.99

I have been a devotee of Wilson Koewing’s prose writing, his smooth as a New Orleans roofie prose writing, for a while. At first I got lucky, gleaning a story here and there from the odd site where he was publishing, then seeing a spike in Koewing pieces flame across my feed as his Twitter flareups became something of a legend, as he did battle upon immortal grounds. And finally I got my hands on my first copy of a real Koewing, his collection Quasi, as it was given birth by Anxiety Press.

I held it upside down and slapped its ass, I was so happy, and the prose was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

Today I hold in my hands MY second Koewing-in-print (though he has published 4 collections in all, this his most recent), a book of short stories called Rolling on the Bottom from Cowboy Jamboree Press. It is an ugly second child, for me, but one you could almost love.

We begin in Europe, one presumes, in the opening story ‘Fantasy, Prague’, Wilson’s own truncated Anora, plunged into the globetrotting that characterizes many of his stories. Next we find ourselves on Lake Annecy, France aboard a catamaran and the dread begins to set in, fear that we are in for a series of tales of the jet set and their ennui. Oh damn what if the mayonnaise is not perfect on the sandwich in the cooler, I might get a divorce, or not bother. But the second story lightly, deftly takes a surprising turn, into a play on time and an ode to getting old. And no story in the collection could have been predicted from what came before: they read like the author’s notebook, in fact, many of the stories seemingly without endings, and bite-sized dabblings in genre fiction, and then back to the rolling literary prose Koewing is master of.

I grew up in Colorado. A town called Cyprus. Any idea how beautiful this place is? It’s so fake looking it’s insane. You should see my high school. It sits in the center of a hill surrounded by a perfect forest with a snow-capped mountain behind it. I felt like an asshole every time I got dropped off.
–Rolling on the Bottom, 17

The meat of the book are in fact a series of short pieces of crime fiction, with the characteristic hardboiled punchy short sentences that is the inner monologue, I always think, of a person about to boil over. Once I got over my shock that that was what the author had decided to do, and to publish, I really enjoyed these little time bombs, and there are about 8 of them sprinkled into this collection. You see I WANT to read about the jet set and their ennui, but the ugly second child has had a difficult pregnancy, he is more ketchy and wayward than Richard III, so we get crime fiction in the start, middle, and end. It is a free-for-all, with something for everyone.

Thumbing back through it, though, I realize that that was just my impression: Koewing can not stray far from his native good taste, and we are back with his stoic bloodhound Odie, tales of expats, and a chef for the pro shop at the golf club, and the world’s most thoughtful suicide, and crime fiction.

More malaise of the wealthy:

Approaching the counter, he passed a couple who were so young and beautiful they didn’t seem real. The woman, especially, was so inconceivably attractive that, for a moment, Price felt like a mere extra in the backdrop of the internet ready conception of their life. He lamented their very existence but could find no reason behind it other than a genuine disdain for himself.
–Rolling on the Bottom, 39-40

These are the sentences of clean but lilting syntax that place Koewing much closer to Fitzgerald than to King, which is what has kept me on his side despite the pettiness of some of his characters. His patient, detailed characterization of the set who jet to Belize instead of Vallarta, who if you cut them do they not bleed, is admirable. We are all of us human, and Wilson shows such empathy with his fellow humans that it is almost sickening, like we were back in the 90s again and getting [insert pleasure] willy-nilly. I can’t normally empathize like this except when I am inside one of someone else’s ruminations, and for me it is a kind of escapism. Maybe when I read Wilson I am, in fact, for a very brief time becoming a better person.

Later on, I forgot about this one, Wilson does another time lapse story: we watch Big E go through his twenties, into his fifties, and then (but no spoilers). There is a third timeline story towards the end of the collection, too, that uses the same conceit to good effect.

I will take a page from a book of a reviewer who publishes critiques of books on The Gorko and elsewhere, Hugh Blanton, who said of my own book of short stories that if you are going to write these things, you need to know how to open with a great first line. And yes, it is one thing I know how to do, and love to see it from other writers. This is from ‘Take Flight’ (Rolling on the Bottom, 53 ff.):

I never should have crawled out of bed, let alone into the sputtering Sentra to drive to hell in the sky—no subtler form of anarchy—the plane.

There is New Orleans and various treatments of Bourbon Street and Fat Tuesday, drugs I did not recognize, and sex galore. Thank god we do not get a ton of details, the sex is just there to set the mood, but the author is not shy to whip it out whenever need be. There is more crime in my second favorite of the collection, the titular story ‘Rolling on the Bottom’ in which State Detective French Calhoun has another dirty day. He ditches the sport coat by noon.

My favorite of the collection is ‘Adrift’, which comes almost last in the book, nestled among crime stories, about an expat returning to New Orleans after blowing off her family’s pleas to help her into detox, to an ambulance chaser’s pad where there is a grungy pool, a bottle of vodka, and a party. The depiction of the Greek house alpha male going to seed, combined with the characterization of the other humans he feeds off of is the story of Nosferatu in some modern, unenlightened sense, the human being as predator yet an abstainer, one of Koewing’s central fascinations.

His stories are crafted and intelligent, and in this collection showcase a surprising range of register, though he returns mainly to his roots: elegantly crafted sentences about sentient creatures struggling across the bottom of this human experiment.

Get it here: ROLLING ON THE BOTTOM

WHAT IS WE IS SERIES?

We Is Series is the new Gorko Club of Books Series of serious book reviews. We plan to review a new indie book a month, or per year, or maybe once a decade.

NO BUT WHAT IS IT

It is series, we are not joking around. The concept is to review new indie books, and to just give you the most honest impression we have got of them.

WHO WRITES IT

Me, Raddy. But if you want to, if you think you have a real honest take on a new indie book, and write words in a row, send queries raddywise to thegorkogazette@gmail.com

Cover image generated on Magic Studio

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