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
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.
A gathering of short stories by an ascended master of the form.
Best known for mega-bestselling horror yarns, King (Finders Keepers, 2015, etc.) has been writing short stories for a very long time, moving among genres and honing his craft. This gathering of 20 stories, about half previously published and half new, speaks to King’s considerable abilities as a writer of genre fiction who manages to expand and improve the genre as he works; certainly no one has invested ordinary reality and ordinary objects with as much creepiness as King, mostly things that move (cars, kid’s scooters, Ferris wheels). Some stories would not have been out of place in the pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, with allowances for modern references (“Somewhere far off, a helicopter beats at the sky over the Gulf. The DEA looking for drug runners, the Judge supposes”). Pulpy though some stories are, the published pieces have noble pedigrees, having appeared in places such as Granta and The New Yorker. Many inhabit the same literary universe as Raymond Carver, whom King even name-checks in an extraordinarily clever tale of the multiple realities hidden in a simple Kindle device: “What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one—or a dozen, or a thousand—where he quit smoking, lived to be 70, and wrote another half a dozen books?” Like Carver, King often populates his stories with blue-collar people who drink too much, worry about money, and mistrust everything and everyone: “Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.” Best of all, lifting the curtain, King prefaces the stories with notes about how they came about (“This one had to be told, because I knew exactly what kind of language I wanted to use”). Those notes alone make this a must for aspiring writers.
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1167-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women’s lives and new ways to tell their...
A collection of stories unified in theme—the struggles of women claiming independence for themselves—but wide-ranging in conception and form.
The women who populate this collection from the novelist and essayist Gay (Bad Feminist, 2014, etc.) are targets for aggressions both micro and macro, from the black scholar in “North Country” who receives constant unwelcome advances and questions of “Are you from Detroit?” to the sisters brutally held in captivity while teenagers in the bracing and subtle “I Will Follow You.” Gay savvily navigates the ways circumstances of gender and class alter the abuses: “Florida” is a cross-section of the women in a wealthy development, from the aimless, neglected white housewives to the Latina fitness trainer who’s misunderstood by them. The men in these stories sometimes come across as caricatures, archetypal violent misogynist-bigots like the wealthy white man playing dress-up with hip-hop culture and stalking the student/stripper in “La Negra Blanca.” But again, Gay isn’t given to uniform indictments: “Bad Priest” is a surprisingly tender story about a priest and the woman he has an affair with, and “Break All the Way Down” is a nuanced study of a woman’s urge for pain in a relationship after the loss of her son. Gay writes in a consistently simple style, but like a longtime bar-band leader, she can do a lot with it: repeating the title phrase in “I Am a Knife” evokes the narrator’s sustained experience with violence, and the title story satirizes snap judgments of women as “loose,” “frigid,” and “crazy” with plainspoken detail. When she applies that style to more allegorical or speculative tales, though, the stories stumble: “Requiem for a Glass Heart” is an overworked metaphorical study of fragility in relationships; “The Sacrifice of Darkness” is ersatz science fiction about the sun’s disappearance; “Noble Things” provocatively imagines a second Civil War but without enough space to effectively explore it.
Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women’s lives and new ways to tell their stories.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2539-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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