A poetic and purposefully perverse collection of stories that describes a dystopian world only slightly divergent from our...
In this collection, Parkison (The Petals of Your Eyes, 2014, etc.) makes absurd that which is commonplace by twisting it into abnormality.
Lyrical and often abstract, these seemingly linked stories call attention to the grotesque in modern society. This book is filled with scenarios that are as ridiculous as they are familiar: a woman drinks a tall, cold glass of milk with dinner and works on a hidden-camera investigation about the cruelty of cows—that is, ferocious cows beating and mistreating farmers; an unidentified narrator offers tips for securing your collection of used condoms against the threat of used-condom thieves; an industry of turning children’s eyes into valuable jewels makes it possible for a rich woman to hire a blue-eyed 14-year-old girl and a green-eyed man to procreate in order to harvest the eyes of their offspring. These stories, distorted and often disgusting, draw attention to the hypocrisy and deviance not only in the world of these characters, but in our own as well. Perhaps the most prevalent signifier of this trope is meat. A mother fanatically insists on the importance of meat, an aunt decorates a corpse in hamburger. The subjects of this collection have a fast-food addiction so acute that they can’t help but be hungry for “Mack-Dawn-A-Dolls” even in the most horrifying situations—for example, when witnessing a man pleasure himself while trespassing on a porch as he eats a hamburger or, worse yet, when a “serial killer/serial rapist” douses a severe flesh burn with condiments, pickles, onions, and cheese. Throughout the collection, this sort of revolting imagery is coupled with poetic prose, further emphasizing the unsightly, the absurd. Parkison’s language is flowery and figurative: “Love child to love child, their velvet lust was like yours—a relic, liminal, yet contagious like consumption.” Although both the message and the writing are sometimes heavy-handed, it is effective. One is moved equally by the lyricism and repulsiveness and can find beauty in both.
A poetic and purposefully perverse collection of stories that describes a dystopian world only slightly divergent from our own.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57366-060-0
Page Count: 96
Publisher: FC2/Univ. of Alabama
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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