Reviewed by Peter Mladinic
One More for the Ditch: A Triptych
by Eric McLaughlin
Anxiety Press
US$19, paperback, ISBN-13: 979-8243717199, March 2026, 241 pages
These three stories are set in a town ironically named Progress. The time is now and then, the future, and the stories are speculative fiction at its best. The book, only a bit over two hundred pages, is sprawling with characters, events, and plots that slowly unfold. In the first story, “A Happy Death” Mo Hale, an investigative reporter, and Lauren Thompson, a mother who has outlived her only child, try to expose the profit-driven drug industry. In the second, “A Helluva Closer,” Greg Thompson, a writer, and Jean Delgado, a young comic meet at a drug rehab counseling session. Their attempt to rob from the rich and give to the poor is thwarted by a demoniacal priest, Father Phil. The third story could be aptly subtitled “The Fallen World,” the consequence of the forces that defeated Mo and Lauren, and then Greg and Jean. It is told in first person by a soldier who lives with Leda, a Hearth Unit. One central character is Joan, a woman. Storyteller Eric McLaughlin has something to say about where we are and where we could be. In his words, his getting “black on white,”’he says it very well. The result is a realized vision, a real fantasy. And it is dark, but good writing is always uplifting.
Progress is regress (to the Stone Age) and One More for the Ditch begins at the end, the burial of Travis, Mo’s brother, who died prematurely from drug abuse. He lived with Mo and Olivia till Olivia “kicked him out.” Olivia supports Mo’s efforts to expose the corruption of the drug industry, but she has limits. Much of the depth of “A Happy Death” stems from Mo and Olivia’s conflicting views. She sympathized with Travis’s situation, but living with him became intolerable. He was Mo’s brother, but also an addict. Like Olivia, Michael, the doctor, and Thad, the pharmacist support Mo, but only so far. Unlike those three characters, Lauren Thompson is willing to go all the way. Her son, Billy, an over-medicated child, stepped into traffic and died, and, as Mo grieves the loss of his brother, Lauren grieves the loss of her son. Both deaths are the result of drugs, and before Mo and Laure meet, Mo has an encounter with Tyler Shaw, a drug industry rep. Here is an excerpt from a scene:
“Let’s say you win one,” I said. I didn’t like my own voice. It begged for combat.
“A clinician prescribes a GLP-1 to a thirteen-year-old girl. She has an extreme anxiety spike. She cuts her wrists.”
The room went still. The two nameless suits and the girl sat frozen. Tyler chewed on his
anger and would have spit in my face in a different setting. He was used to running roughshod over dissent. Probably on charm and looks alone. He spread his hands.
“We’re just operating in the system we have. If we don’t, someone else will.”
“Interesting logic,” I said.
Tyler’s smile sharpened. His fangs bared. A vampire sucking blood from the people he professed to help.
Tyler embodies the corruption and epitomizes the power of the industry that Mo and Lauren are up against.
Comedy, which leads to happiness, and combat, which results in destruction play key roles in “A Helluva Closer.” Greg and Jean meet at Substance Abusers Anonymous.They become romantically interested in each other. Both want a better world, in which people are less dependent on drugs. Yet in this story Jean corrupts Greg. Jean, a comic, introduces Greg to her comedian friends, and that’s all well and good. But she also gives him Zoloft and eggs him on to rob a mansion and destroy property in it. Father Phil is introduced in the middle of the story. He is the arch-villain who Jean and Greg combat, and who, along with his son Martin, defeats them. One newscaster reports:
Father Phil as he has been called in his YouTube videos has promised to return power to the people once he has brought the current civil unrest to heel …America needs a strong leader, a business man, someone who tells it like it is:
What America has to lose is poignantly depicted in the death of Bob, a comic who meets his demise in a dark alley right after finishing his stint on stage. Dying, he saw Nancy and the girls and the four of them sat down for dinner and they smiled and held hands and Bob couldn’t believe all the love in that room at that moment and he began to cry and Cassie wiped his tears and kissed his knuckles and then all of it dimmed slowly and slowly and then there was nothing.
The protagonist in “A Fully Clothed Breakfast” is a soldier in The American Dominion: corporations, technology, plastics, and oil. He was drafted upon finishing high school. “Knock’m dead, sport,” my dad said. He piloted a drone, and cleaned up the aftermath: “Dismembered fingers, stomach fluid, and blood and urine.” He and his fellow soldiers “compared scores.”
And yet, sometimes, out there on the battlefield, as my drone ripped a man in half from left and right and stomped the skull of another into the mud with a wet-sticky burst, I felt something. I didn’t know what to call it at the time. I might now but I am not certain. I felt something, deep inside of me. It made my chest tighten and it made my arms and legs itch. Like a pair of eyes zeroed in on my back. Like I was a gazelle who knew a lion crouched behind me though I couldn’t see him.
Fighting and fucking: war is compared to fornication. The soldiers, men, are rewarded with female Hearth units, called “pearls.” And he says, “Is this not Utopia? Men getting whatever they want as soon as they want it? Is this not heaven on earth?” As things turn out, it is quite the opposite. He soon tires of his pearl, Leda’s perfection. At night he keeps her charged in the garage. His life is programmed freedom, with Chuck Farrell, the compliance investigator, paying regular visits to his house to ensure Leda is fulfilling his needs. The fighting and fornication mode spins out of control, when he meets Joan, a woman who was expelled from her Coven because she was thought to have MAPS, Mitochondrial Antiviral Progression Syndrome, which is highly infectious. Ultimately, Joan is raped by the men who took her in, and then rescued and taken in by the narrator, Leda’s “good husband.” The narrator’s fellow soldiers come to his home to reclaim Joan, and Leda goes into combat mode, killing the men. The narrator attributes Joan with saving him. She taught him “What it meant to be free.”
The plots of these three stories unfold slowly. All three have many characters, and each character is necessary, each plays a part in moving their story to its conclusion. In the first two stories the main characters are well intentioned but become victims of their own righteousness. Ironically the protagonist of “A Fully Clothed Breakfast” wins the war, not on the battlefield but within himself. Each story consists of dark, fully realized scenes in which great attention has been paid to detail, and the crafting of dialogue and sentences. Eric McLaughlin has something to say about where we live and how we live. He says it in One More for the Ditch.
About the reviewer: Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.