Gabe Hudson

“Funny as hell…Mr. Hudson’s style goes from zero to one hundred MPH in the first sentence.””

“Dear Mr. President is a war book like no other. The stories are a surreal mix of the tragic, the violent and the humorous, like war itself. It’s as if Salvador Dali had rewritten All Quiet on the Western Front.””

“An acutely inventive collection…. Hudson’s sensitive, lost narrators may be soldiers, but their sentences come from elsewhere entirely—a hilarious world never glimpsed directly but clearly forged from marketing presentations, government bureaucratese and twice-translated slang. Military life, here, is surreal: delusions explode like SCUD missiles. (Hudson is) a writer who confronts the preposterousness of war with some preposterousness all his own.””

“Hudson writes about a pain so vast and shattering that the only way it can safely surveyed is with night goggles and hallucinatory humor. He has a wonderful way of amplifying the take-it-for-granted madness of war . . . Dear Mr. President documents the damage that war inflicts on America. This depiction of madness, this blur of comedy and tragedy is done with deft humor and convincing passion.””

“A major literary feat. Like the war at its center, Dear Mr. President is hallucinatory, fast, and wantonly disturbing, but also a victory.””

“These twisted tales about soldiers’ lives manage to be at once hilarious and sobering.””

“Gabe Hudson is not your average-looking novelist. Standing 6ft 4in tall, he has the steely eyes of a coyote and a crew cut as severe as the crops they dish out in Marine Corps. He says he drew from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian the conviction that a young man had to see the world and find adventure. His experiences in the corps, and his encounters with fellow recruits from all racial and social backgrounds, have provided him with rich literary fodder ever since. His first book, Dear Mr. President, is a collection of short stories exploring the strains put on the troops during and after the first Gulf war. His characters suffer from post-traumatic stress-like symptoms and the ravages of Gulf war syndrome. The stories contain strong characters and vivid narratives, layered with surreal imagery. The writing ripples with violence, credibly depicted with the benefit of Hudson’s own days as a scrapping marine.””

“In Hudson’s weird, wonderful world…. the Persian Gulf War, that outwardly pristine conflict, comes at last into its literary own.””

“Wickedly funny and extremely touching work. Cannot—and should not—be ignored.””

“Dear Mr. President is a phalanx of ingeniously twisted tales…. Equal parts tragedy and travesty, it manages to be both febrile and funny, sad and sardonic…. Hudson stands on the shoulders of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut.””

“Devour this book… You could probably mine the thesaurus all day in a vain attempt to describe Gabe Hudson’s first book, Dear Mr. President…. Unique? Definitely, though that doesn’t cover it. Funny, almost always, in a wonderfully twisted way, but this isn’t humor writing. Profound? Sort of, like a Dave Barry version of Apocalypse Now script. He’s the kind of writer who will have you giggling profusely and contemplatively staring at the wall—all in the same paragraph.””

“Hudson is a major new voice in fiction…. Dear Mr. President is a splendid combination of humor and horror, absurdity and abomination, delight and disdain. We’d be a better nation if we listened to Hudson’s….gutsy and intelligent take on the America we don’t want to admit we’ve become.””

“Ought to be required reading for Congress . . . for it captures with harrowing freshness the madness and stupidity of war. Not unlike the work of another war satirist, Joseph Heller, his heroes survive, if they survive, by retreat into the imagination . . . a study in the psychological complexities of the life of a soldier.””

“Surreal, disturbingly funny. . . . Beneath the absurd scenarios is real compassion.””

“Hudson displays a brilliantly macabre sense of humor, a fine ear for military and beauracratic clichés, and abundant compassion for his quirky, bruised characters.””

““An ex-rifleman in the Marine reserves, Mr. Hudson writes with great feeling and skill about the Gulf War.””

“Seductively hallucinatory, subversively comic.””

“Powerful and entertaining…. Hudson takes us on a hilariously dark tour of the Gulf War experience.””

“One of the best comic writers of his generation. In the tradition of dark war narratives such as Slaughter-House Five, all of the stories blend humor with the horrors of war.””

“Hudson . . . writes like a grounded, focused combination of Chuck Palahniuk and Kurt Vonnegut. He’s less choppy than either, but occupies a similarly queasy quasi-reality that can be simultaneously entertaining and baffling. His ambiguous stories read as metaphors or case histories, as widely symbolic or unsettlingly literal. That shifting ambiguity, which Hudson’s characters and readers experience in equal measure, makes these stories as compelling as they are disturbing.””

“Surreal and funny as hell, funny and hellish in the absurdist tradition of Catch 22 and Dr. Strangelove. Hudson has an amazing and vivid imagination…It’s like listening to the rantings of someone with a high fever: fascinating and scary.””

“One of the year’s most provocative story collections.””

“Hudson tackles the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. Hudson does for it what Tim O’Brien did for Vietnam—he’s upped the ante. Big time.””

“The stories are powerful indictments of the atrocities committed by both sides.””

“Phantasmagorical events befall the soldiers in Dear Mr. President…a floridly violent and hallucinatory collection.””

“The stories offer the reader a sometimes absurdist, and almost always hallucinatory vision of war’s horrors and its aftermath. Accordingly they are required reading.””