A somber but consistently intriguing clutch of heartland tales.
A serial killer, car wrecks, suicide, alcoholism—everyday life in a prairie town gets dark in this debut set of linked stories.
The 11 stories in this short but emotionally dense collection all take place in a Chicago exurb that’s hit the skids. A trailer park decimated by fire has been converted into a paintball park with a post-apocalyptic theme, but the casino is doing brisk business, as is the prison. That’s where Hartley, a successful commodities trader, resides after having been convicted of vehicular manslaughter, an incident that’s had a broad impact. His wife, Glennis, has descended deeper into an alcoholism that’s already been stoked by a rough past, including the murder of her hard-drinking mother by the “Soyfield Strangler.” Victor, whose wife, Sonia, Hartley killed, sublimates his grief by spraying pesticides on the cemetery he runs, which eradicates the dreaded oak beetles but kills plenty of birds as well. (“Conventional grief management it ain’t, but it just feels good to waste those little fuckers.”) His sister-in-law, Allie, is trying to help Victor while navigating a flailing marriage. The stories don’t follow a linear path—the book begins the day before Hartley’s release but jumps around in time from, say, Glennis as a teenager to an intervention Hartley attempted shortly before the accident. That indirect approach can make it difficult to discern where we are in time and relationships, but disorientation is one of Harper’s goals—he wants to establish the town as a place rife with unlikely deaths and near-death experiences, dark secrets, and broken relationships. Harper occasionally has his characters voice some only-in-a-novel profundities to get that point over, but he’s also accessed a plainspoken but effectively moody prose style that gets into the details of each character’s life while suggesting a larger storm cloud that makes his setting Bad News, U.S.A.
A somber but consistently intriguing clutch of heartland tales.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4735-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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