Review: Scar Songs by W. Royce Adams

Exploring the complex and commonly overlooked emotional experiences of men, Scar Songs by W. Royce Adams is a bold and unabashed collection of stories that looks at fraternal friendship, along with grief, growth, love, and purpose.

These vignettes are candid glimpses into the lives of ordinary people, in large part, but they reveal that even the most forgettable interactions can have long-lasting impacts and echoes. Using an impressive economy of language, Adams captures the psyche and struggles of each story’s protagonist with a compelling rawness.

In “Thief Catcher,” a young man must pit his sense of duty and need for employment against his basic humanity and compassion, and the dawning reality that punishing poverty doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. “The Last Tequila Run” is a surprisingly tender story of two self-destructive friends who drunkenly cross paths with the law in Mexico, only to realize that their ill-fated adventure might be their last before war and distance pull them apart.

A jazz legend who disappeared for years to a Zen monastery suddenly resurfaces, secretive and seemingly heartbroken, but a rare interview reveals that he has become something of a “musical messiah,” in a story of the same name. Playing with musical theory, stylistic prose, artistic philosophy, and character-driven drama, this tightly penned tale is one of the best in the collection. In “Too Late Naytan,” an unexpected layover leads to one man’s nostalgic reminiscence on a strange friendship that had redirected and defined his younger life. Determined to reconnect with that long-lost friend once the plane lands, the main character of this story realizes that memories are sometimes all we are granted.

The titular story is a powerful eulogy for the loss of a brother, a remembrance of innocence and closeness and the promises of childhood. With reflective time jumps and real-time conversations, as well as stark formatting that strips the emotions bare, this is the type of story that will leave you in tears, humming along with the characters on the final page. “Getting Even” is another standout, revealing the complex emotions people feel around death, and the pressure of social norms to generously absolve the dead of their sins.

Playing with tropes of emotionally detached male relationships, but peeling back those heavy-handed facades, these stories will echo in relatable ways for countless male readers. The writing style is straightforward and declarative in most pieces, without flowery embellishment, though Adams can sometimes flourish up a passage with a description-laden line that shines. From top to bottom, this collection is carefully curated and each story is sharply remarkable in its potency, plunging readers into unique premises, quickly acquainting them with the setting, and making them sincerely invest in these scarred, deeply human characters.

There are some technical slip-ups, including missing commas, inconsistent dialogic formatting, and an overuse of certain tools in some stories, e.g. ellipses, but most of the prose is cleanly crafted. Boasting explorations of depression, repression, self-deception, and revelation to revenge, resentment, forgiveness, and sacrifice, Adams runs readers through an aggressive gamut of emotions, for an insightful and thematically complex collection.