Review: Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
Another book in Penguin Mini Classics and this time it’s a collection of Donald Bartheleme stories. I thought most of the stories were enjoyable, they were playful and absurd and successfully played with the conventions of a short story. It’s definitely not for everyone. A couple of stories didn’t quite hit the mark like The Glass Mountain where the story is told through a numerical list. However, the title story and The Balloon where a gigantic balloon covers a large section of an undisclosed city and where people can walk on is wonderful.
The title story in where a group of friends decide to hang their friend Colby because “because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him.” A funny moment occurs when Colby suggest that they use a firing squad but one friend says:
“a firing squad would just be an ego trip for Colby, the blindfold and the last-cigarette bit, and that Colby was in enough hot water without trying to ‘upstage’ everyone with unnecessary theatrics.”
