The bizarre and often inscrutable worlds here should find fans among lovers of cutting-edge short fiction.
A debut short story collection from Bosnian writer Bakic takes an off-kilter look at sexuality, death, and the power of literature.
In “Day Trip to Durmitor,” the first story in Bakic’s mysterious debut, two secretaries of the afterlife greet the dead protagonist. Her task, they explain, is to write a book of stories; if they’re good, the protagonist gets to return to the land of the living—as a zombie on the “hunt for the human brain.” After all, one of the secretaries says, “Literature is…the primary link between life and death.” Indeed, many of Bakic’s stories have writer protagonists who are in deeply strange predicaments. One wants to write an article on a cult living in a cave made of green glowing rock only to discover she has the same supernatural powers as the cult leader (“The Guest”). One is a novelist caught in a web of deception and obsession over the true author of the latest literary smash (“Passions”). Another is, with all other writers, part of a new settlement on Mars after being exiled from Earth when writing was declared “the greatest evil to have befallen humankind” (“Mars”). There is even an Orphan Black–esque narrative in which a writer named Asja has been cloned and must organize with her variants against their creator (“Asja 5.0”). Bakic’s stories are perfectly of the American short-fiction zeitgeist—dark, sometimes indeterminate, sidestepping realism—but as the afterword points out, there are few writers from the Balkans that make use of the speculative or the dystopian in their work, which makes this collection all the more darkly alluring.
The bizarre and often inscrutable worlds here should find fans among lovers of cutting-edge short fiction.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-936932-48-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A new edition of the by now classic collection of affiliated stories which has already established its deserved longevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1963
ISBN: 055338256X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963
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