Product Description

expose, v.t. (F. exposer): To deprive of concealment; to discover; to lay open to public inspection, or bring to public notice.

Hope and promise are drowned in the black floodwaters of New Orleans and the churning concrete of expansion. The underclass is force-fed to the grinding machines of progress. Youth are slashed to ribbons by poverty. Autocratic governments sell addiction to the masses to numb them into complacency. Shopping sprees and material excess are the new cults. Reality television microwaves brains into plastic left-on-the-heater mush.

Liberation has a price only a few are willing to pay.

In Exposed!, a collection of horror fiction from Mike Heffernan, the smog clears just a bit, we're cut wide open like a vivisection and our dirty insides are on display.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3713488 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 180 pages

Review
EXPOSED! shines a harsh light on the myriad horrors of modern society and reports back from the fearful frontlines with wicked wit and paranoid power. From the murky waters of New Orleans to the scarred psyches of our own image-obsessed existence, EXPOSED! is the last headline we get to read before reality comes tumbling down. -- Jeremy Robert Johnson, author of Extinction Journals and Angel Dust Apocalypse

Among the 'writers to watch' in the realm of strange storytelling. Interrogates the hazy borderland between the human and the inhumane. A crafty form of social commentary. -- Michael A. Arnzen, author of Play Dead and Grave Markings

With EXPOSED!, Mike Heffernan delivers a heady mélange of Swiftian satire blended with the outré oddness of Caro and Jeunet's cinematic outings. EXPOSED! imagines a world where even Z-grade celebrities are hunted down for crimes of narcissism, the elderly and insane are processed like psychedelic chattel, and labor conflicts are worse than ever. Must-read stuff for the post-apocalyptic set. -- B.H. Fingerman, author of Recess Pieces and Bottomfeeder

About the Author
Born and raised in the historic harbor city of St. John's, Newfoundland, the oldest city in North America, Mike Heffernan has been poking his nose around in the darker side of the human condition for as long as he can remember. He thinks he can pinpoint his baptism in blood to primary school, when his cousin subjected him to an almost daily dose of a deadly cocktail of horror movies.

Mike later cut his teeth on such nastiness as Barker, Skipp and Spector, Romero and King. Writing since his adolescence, he put his creative endeavors on hold to study German history, but came back to horror with a mean vengeance. It's been full-tilt-boogie for some time now, and it seems to be panning out. His books include Aim for the Head, A Dark and Deadly Valley, and Exposed!

Customer Reviews

Exposed! at last!
I penned the introduction to this collection, not because I know Mike Heffernan (never met him) but because these stories are great! Sharp, insightful...and twisted in a marvelous way. Following are a couple notes I made in the introduction:

In the title story, "Exposed," Heffernan paints a world not unlike that of Stephen King's "Running Man." But in this dark universe, the "runners" are former celebrities now scrambling to hide from their former notoriety. And the good folk - the old and infirm - are their ironically potent enemy as they watch a game show that combines the violence of "Running Man" with "America's Most Wanted."

Then there's "Cold Deck," which offers one of the volume's most effective explorations of the (in)human condition. In it, Heffernan imagines a society where the men have literally replaced their limbs with saws and other logging implements to become the most effective tools for their jobs. And in typical human fashion, the faceless corporation that benefited from their dedication leaves them behind. And in typical human fashion, the women, not the men, take the decisive retributative action.

While the denizens of "Cold Deck" may be hapless victims of the uber-machine, the lead character of "Stains of Life" is a willful acceptor of enslavement. Here, Heffernan paints another distopia - a land where the government imprisons and exploits drug-users. Except that, before they were imprisoned, they weren't hooked on the stuff. Again freedom, liberation, is a central theme. And the personal decision on whether to choose freedom - at the potential price of death - is played out in a haunting denouement. Another key theme for Mike is that while everything may look cozy...the acceptance of a veneer of happiness is dangerous. While everyone in "Stains of Life" is getting their fix, one character says "Don't let appearances fool you. It isn't as innocent as it looks...This is a terrible place."

None of Mike's stories are as innocent as they may appear at first glance. They are terrible places, made so because they live close to where we live now; they are places that are only two steps to the right of today. It's not so hard to see the drug-concentration camps come true. Or the corporate genocide, of sorts, of a whole adapted blockade of workers. Or the persecution of an entire societal segment via a TV show.

He also knows that appearances lie. In Heffernan's fiction, it's deadly to dig through the smooth, masking walls to discover the truth of what's really going on behind them.

And truth is really at the heart of seeking, of living, isn't it? Mike has a strong sense of dark humor, and in "Open 24/7" he postulates an Art Bell scenario that would appeal to anyone who has spent several days with insomnia. Perhaps there ARE things out there waiting to help us. But help us accomplish...what, exactly? Is it really the truth that those things unveil? Or is it something worse. More primal?

This collection posits all sorts of questions about the dark motives behind the human condition. And every story entertains as it explores. I really enjoyed reading Exposed! I think you will too.

The Apocalypse Will Be Televised
From the flooded nightmare of Hurricane Katrina to the dusty roads under a post-apocalyptic sky, Mike Heffernan's "Exposed!" brings us ten tales of the heart of darkness.
Heffernan clearly understands the underpinnings of modern horror fiction. The tension and build-up to his gory, gruesome, or creepily-ironic climaxes are very well done, and the details (always a make-or-break point in short fiction I find) are right on the money. At 203 pages you can hardly call "Exposed!" wordy, and perhaps most telling of his talent is the fact that none of the stories in it feel unfinished, incomplete, or rushed.
For fans of the genre, I would put "Exposed!" on a rough par with short story collections like Stephen King's "Night Shift" or "Skeleton Crew", with the caveat that "Exposed!" is both somewhat narrower in scope and about as consistently entertaining as the above titles. "Exposed!" borrows much of King's style (in a good way) to make the horror therein reverberate with a very human tone. The things that go bump in the night are just as often vanity, jealousy, hunger, lonliness, madness, and pain as they are Cthulu-like Lovecraftian monsters.
For me, the stories that stood out were the eponymous "Exposed!" which could (as Heffernan tells us in his notes) have been much longer, "24/7" a story about the waking nightmare of working on little or no sleep, "Starved to Death" which makes my current dieting regime seem positively indulgent in comparison, and the deliciously terrifying "Home is Where the Heart Is". Of this group, the only one that involves anything truly supernatural was "Home is Where the Heart Is" about a monster beneath the flood waters of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
Among these, my favorite was probably "Exposed!" because of its gruesome, paranoid gleefulness. Heffernan talks about his influences in an author's introduction, and they clearly shine through in the stories. When reading this collection, you will hear the echoes of "Soylent Green", "Logan's Run", "The Gunslinger", "Night of the Living Dead", "The Running Man", "Thinner", "Insomnia", "Army of Darkness" and many others. Heffernan doesn't make the mistake of assuming we haven't heard his stories before, and instead gives us more of what he knows (as a horror fan himself) that we like.
Which is not to say that there aren't wildly original moments here as well. The story "Cold Deck" features a camp of lumber workers who have had their arms replaced with saws and other tools so they can do their jobs more efficiently. This sort of imposition of semi-horrific things on the human body tends to be a recurring theme, and I think works very well in context of most of the stories. Also, it is in "Cold Deck" that Mike starts experimenting with local dialect, and it lends a welcome clarity to a story that otherwise would have been far too surreal to be truly entertaining.
I only have two complaints about "Exposed!" and they are both concerned with presentation, not content. The first is the hideous cover image. Not only does it not have the effect that was intended, but it is so comically off-putting that I fear many who would otherwise read this book will pass it over based on that image alone. Despite the recent death of Anna Nicole Smith being a possible thematic tie-in, I think that "Exposed!" will suffer because of it.
My second complaint is the Introduction by John Everson. Given the content of the eponymous "Exposed!" short story, one might think that even Heffernan could appreciate the irony of this blatantly vain and unnecessary stroke-fest. Most tellingly, though, is how the Introduction (which is phrased and titled in essay style) fails to give us any valuable insight at all, and serves merely as an extended and puffed-up commercial for the stories that follow. I didn't mind the intro written by the author himself, or the three interesting-but-almost-irrelevant-to-the-story epigraphs that Heffernan included, but by the time I got to Everson's overblown Introduction I found myself wondering if this was done solely to push the book over the 200 page mark. I personally would rather have had two or three more stories than 15+ pages of extraneous DVD-Extra Features-esque pontification.
Minor flaws aside, "Exposed!" is an excellent read, and a worthy addition to the Stephen King/Dean Koontz/Richard Matheson section of your bookshelf. I think we are only just now seeing the first output of an author that will continue to grow and mature with time. Also be on the lookout for "A Dark and Deadly Valley" and "Aim for the Head", which are slated to be released in the near future.

-Reviewed by Mark R. Brand, author of "Red Ivy Afternoon" and "The Prince and the Pitchman"

Scary Stuff
Usually, in good short story collections there will be one, two, or even three stories I really don't care for. In the case of Exposed, I liked them all! Every story in this collection paints a dark, disturbing and memorable experience for the reader. Glad I decided to pick this book up, it's an excellent read from beginning to end.