Lively, varied tales that incisively showcase the trickiness of contemporary life.
In this debut collection, the characters navigate careers, relationships, and religious angst in 14 short stories alternating between realism and whimsy.
Many of the author’s protagonists are entitled young men whose supposed problems overlay their privilege—or, in short bursts of magic realism, point to absurdities in modern life. In the title story (named after a Jack White lyric), the narrator can’t help but deliver electric shocks; does his condition make him a danger or a would-be superhero? He meets someone who’s willing to take a chance that his electricity might sometimes be healing rather than harmful. Two of the best tales, “Smiling” and “The B’Jesus,” similarly imagine guys isolated by difference: one whose inability to stop smiling loses him his girlfriend and his job; and another who has worn an old homunculus on his back since he “scared” it out of Great Aunt “Early” Earlene. Elsewhere, religion is the source of inner turmoil. In “The Great Salt Lake Desert,” Ian’s composure is imperiled after he loses his virginity to a lapsed Mormon and encounters the Sodom and Gomorrah story in a Gideon Bible. Likewise, in “Heeding Doctor Eisner,” the overall standout, the Nabokov-ian narrator, an adjunct sociology professor, is so rattled by a Hispanic “preacher” on a train that he enacts his own version of hellfire. Judaism is a recurring point of reference, often as a stricture to be transcended, as when the kids of “High Holy Days” find small, cheeky ways to defile the synagogue—a reminder that “holiness wasn’t only in the sanctuary.” Premature births, mental illness, new media, and freeloading are central concerns in other tales in this skilled collection (most of the stories were previously published in literary magazines). “Vacancy,” about a teenager who unwittingly inspires a punk band’s new song, is the one piece that doesn’t seem to fit. Tillman (English, Newbury College) writes a terrific first line (“I was ten years old when the neighbors called the police to extinguish the Holy Sock Fire my mother had started in the parking lot of our building”). But his sometimes-inconclusive endings are a mite less successful.
Lively, varied tales that incisively showcase the trickiness of contemporary life.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9989667-0-0
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Braddock Avenue Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations,...
These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi (Boy Snow Bird, 2014).
The opener, "Books and Roses," sets the tone: stories within stories and a fittingly cockeyed view of Gaudi’s architecture as two women in Barcelona share their experiences in abandonment while searching for the loved ones who left them behind. Most of the volume takes place in England, with nods toward Eastern Europe. In " 'Sorry' Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea," weight-loss clinician Anton becomes increasingly involved in raising his boyfriend’s two adolescent daughters, Aisha and Dayang, while fishsitting for a traveling friend. The story seems straightforward until Anton’s friend falls in long-distance love with a mystery woman who's entered his locked house without a key and Anton’s co-worker Tyche helps Aisha recover from a crisis in disillusionment by casting a spell from the Greek goddess Hecate. Tyche returns as a student puppeteer in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?," which layers creepy echoes of Pinocchio onto realistically genuine adolescent sexual confusion. Readers realize Tyche’s fellow students Radha and Myrna have ended up sexually happy-ever-after when they pop up in "Presence" to lend their shared apartment to a psychologist so she and her grief-counselor husband can carry out the ironically eponymous science-fiction experiment that forces the psychologist to accept the absences in her life. While Aisha appears as a filmmaker employing puppets in "Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?," Dayang stars as ingénue in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," a post-feminist romantic comedy about warring men's and women’s societies at Cambridge. Several stories are pure fairy tale, like "Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose," a twisted take on "Little Red Riding Hood,” and "Drownings," in which good intentions defeat a murderous tyrant.
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi’s stories are often cheerfully sentimental.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-463-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.
Science fiction author (The Wall of Storms, 2016) and translator (The Redemption of Time, Baoshu, 2019) Liu’s short stories explore the nature of identity, consciousness, and autonomy in hostile and chaotic worlds.
Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia (“Ghost Days”). A poor salvager on a distant planet learns to channel a revolutionary spirit through her alter ego of a rabbit (“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard”). In “Byzantine Empathy,” a passionate hacktivist attempts to upend charitable giving through blockchain and VR technology even as her college roommate, an executive at a major nonprofit, fights to co-opt the process, a struggle which asks the question of whether pure empathy is possible—or even desired—in our complex geopolitical structure. Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity, in which human minds are scanned and uploaded to servers, establishing an immortal existence in virtuality, a concept which many previous SF authors have already explored exhaustively. (Liu also never explains how an Earth that is rapidly becoming depleted of vital resources somehow manages to indefinitely power servers capable of supporting 300 billion digital lives.) However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance in its depiction of a father who stubbornly clings to a flesh-and-blood existence for himself and his loved ones in the rotting remains of human society years after most people have uploaded themselves (“Staying Behind”). There is also some charm in the title tale, a fantasy stand-alone concerning a young woman snatched from her home and trained as a supernaturally powered assassin who retains a stubborn desire to seek her own path in life.
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-03-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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