Alive in Shape and Color

Editor's note: This review will run in Mountain Times (Boone, NC) print and online Nov. 30, 2017, to coincide with publisher's release date.

Art for literature's sake: Lawrence Block's 'Alive in Shape and Color' a fitting encore

Great art makes for great reading — that was the premise behind Lawrence Block’s literary rock star-filled anthology in December 2016, “In Sunlight or in Shadow,” and that’s the idea behind that volume’s competent encore, “Alive in Shape and Color,” due on bookstore shelves a little less than a year later, on Dec. 5.

Like its predecessor, “Alive in Shape and Color” (Pegasus Books) calls on Block’s deep author connections to fill the volume. Although Stephen King — and, surprisingly, Block himself, a five-decade veteran of fiction production — opted out of this release, other names that already populate your home bookshelves — Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child and a dozen others — make a second, or in a very few cases, first, appearance with strong offerings of stories influenced by a particular piece of art.

Unlike “In Sunlight or in Shadow,” in which each tale was inspired by an Edward Hopper painting, “Alive in Shape and Color” allowed the authors themselves to finesse their own brand of artistry from a work of their choosing. And so, we have the expected — Gauguin, Rockwell, O’Keefe, van Gogh — side by side with the esoteric, say, “The Cave Paintings of Lascaux” or a piece of art that is not a painting at all, i.e. Rodin’s “The Thinker.”

But like its companion tome, these are no throwaway stories dashed off as a favor to a friend who needed an A-list of authors to overlay the cover art. Indeed, speaking to the effort that even the most productive of these writers put into “In Sunlight or in Shadow,” the result was award winning stories. King’s piece for that volume, “The Music Room,” earned an Edgar nomination, while Oates’ “The Woman in the Window” has been selected for “The Best American Mystery Stories 2017,” by way of two examples.

Which explains David Morrell’s “Orange is for anguish, blue for insanity,” a tale in "Alive in Shape and Color" that creates a fictional artist so real you’ll Google the name to fact-check yourself, Deaver’s “A Significant Find” with its Poe-esque flair for the macabre or 14 others that will do what a short story does best — leave it resonating in your brain a week later.

Couple the tales with the excellent production of the volume from Pegasus, including full color reproductions of the art, and not only is the $25.95 price your best value for a keepsake volume, it's a deal even at twice the $12.99 cost of the Kindle edition.

Some books, after all, are simply better in hardcover, and that includes those whose visual displays are worth a thousand words — and then some.