Reviews of three new books.   Forest Blood by Jeff Golden (Wellstone Press, 300 pages, $15) I'M A LUMBERJACK Once upon a time, Oregon's forests were war zones where loggers and environmentalists fought bloody battles for the trees. Now, the bitter conflict seems confined to isolated pockets of exasperation when mega-corporations threaten rare stands of pristine old growth. Years too late comes this predictable story of a logger stuck between his loyalty to the company and his love for a childhood sweetheart-turned-treehugger. Forest Blood is set in the fictional town of Lewis Falls, a small timber community that hasn't changed much in decades. Protagonist Jack Gilliam is a third-generation logger who accepts his destiny and takes up the chain saw just as expected. But when the logging company operating in the local forest steps up production, the tension between the tree-huggers and tree-killers mounts, and Jack falls victim to eco-terrorism. In Jeff Golden's hands, the story lumbers along with more flaws than a slab of knotty pine. Golden's writing is clogged with sap, including this passage from an excruciating love scene: "Her buns were tight as hot sausages in a denim skirt as I kneaded them." Lewis Falls residents apparently walk around with bark dust in their mouths, because Golden has them using such words as "mmhhh," "hunnhhh" and "aaooooeeee." The story roars to life a few times, especially when Jack describes tree-cutting, but this novel truly needs an editor with a very sharp chain saw. Even if Golden, who used to work in Portland government and now lives in Ashland, had produced this book in the thick of Oregon's timber tension, it wouldn't have been any more compelling. The cardboard characters and plywood-flat plot aren't even juicy enough to be called pulp fiction. Susan Wickstrom   The Unexpected Salami by Laurie Gwen Shapiro (Algonquin, 296 pages, $18.95) Rock 'n' Roll Babes from Outer Space by Linda Jaivin (Broadway, 278 pages, $13) STRANGERS IN PARADISE Two books set in Australia's rock 'n' roll underworld and told from the perspective of female outsiders show up in the same month. Coincidence? Upon close scrutiny, it appears so. Laurie Gwen Shapiro's The Unexpected Salami is so many light years ahead of Linda Jaivin's Rock 'n' Roll Babes from Outer Space, it's barely in the same genre, let alone the same league. In the latter, the outsider is an alien girl from the planet Nufon. She and her two best friends steal a spacecraft and land on Earth in search of cute Earthlings to abduct for sexual experimentation. Jaivin is relentless with her pop-culture references, pumping the rock canon and last year's alien craze for all they're worth: Metallica, The X-Files, Smashing Pumpkins, Klingons, "Bette Davis Eyes," The Twilight Zone, the Foo Fighters, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It gets worse when she uses name-dropping to make lame jokes like, "Lati raised her eyebrows and threw Doll a look so cheeky it could've been Mama Cass's arse." Jaivin pulls such abominations out of her own arse throughout as the girls do a lot of drugs, diddle every character in the alt-rocker handbook--from dreadlocked stoner to lesbian vampire--become international rock stars and, in a climatic scene at a stadium show, manage to save the entire planet. Their sidekicks include God, who shows up anytime anyone says, "Oh, God," and a horny dog-like alien pet who gets in on the sex-experiment action, humping legs, sucking cocks and ejaculating pink semen. As if such gross-outs weren't offensive enough, Jaivin has to throw in ignorant stereotypes that reveal the shallowness of her hipster posturing: A guy with eyebrow rings get stuck on his partner's labial piercing; all of Jaivin's musicians live in filth and can't make emotional commitments. Perhaps Jaivin herself is an alien; when it comes to emotional situations and character development, she's as monotone as Spock. Rachel, the outsider in The Unexpected Salami, is equally foreign to the Aussie boys she encounters: She's a half Jewish, half Italian New Yorker with a mile-wide mean streak. Her quest is much more complex than the Nufonian babes': She flees Melbourne after she witnesses a mob hit at the taping of a video for her roommates' band. But when Rachel gets back to New York, she can't get on with her life, can't forget about her old roommate, Colin, and can't believe what she finds out about the murder. The more she runs away from trouble, the more it springs back on her, in the form of a junkie who needs her help going cold turkey, a trial about another murder and her interfering parents. Back in Australia, the mob shooting has become an urban legend, the video is in frequent rotation and Colin's mediocre band is an overnight success. When he comes to New York on tour, the denouement is as unbelievable as the original premise. Half the story is told from Colin's perspective, and Shapiro does an impressive job balancing these two characters, developing them fully and using their thoughts about each other to build a suspenseful, surprising and engaging story. It's rock 'n' roll, not rocket science, but The Unexpected Salami makes for a tasty, satisfying read. Karen E. Steen - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published April 14, 1999