A spooky, creepy collection certain to bewitch fans of the dark side.
A volume of stories ranging from the bizarre to the horrific.
Rein’s 22 tales spin fantastical, creatively sinister webs and conjure the dark artistry of horror fiction. The work begins with “The Detour,” a character-driven story that follows Emma Rae and Carlene, two God-fearing redheaded twins who remain haunted by a kidnapping in their youth. As history repeats itself, the girls exact their mouthwatering revenge on the “monster” that traumatized their childhood. Other characters who fear for their safety include an embittered husband in “Canceled,” who becomes paranoid that his soon-to-be divorcée might return with malice in mind, and the woman in “The Night Visitor,” who spends her entire life terrorized by a night-visiting witch. Dracula lovers will certainly appreciate the unique thirsts of lady vampire Mora and her bloodsucking adventures aboard a luxury cruise ship in the cinematically conceived “Forbitten Love.” It’s a story so creatively conceived it begs for further literary development, as does “Reflections,” in which a magic compact mirror tells the future for a pair of senior singles gambling on love. Remarkably for such a large assemblage, the tales never become dull or repetitive. The author animates her characters, setting them in dire, deadly, and supernatural circumstances. Rein revels in the macabre with devilish pleasure: Haunted houses hold long-forgotten crimes, ghosts lurk around apartment realtor showings, spectral paintings come alive, and an overprotective father who decides to do his daughter a favor and murderously eliminate her unfit boyfriend from the Thanksgiving festivities remarks, “Someday she’ll thank me.” Though some stories do miss the “eerie” mark entirely or feel a bit underdeveloped, there is still plenty to enjoy elsewhere. Fans of sinister suspense, odd characters, and short spine-chillers will find Rein’s imagination on full display.
A spooky, creepy collection certain to bewitch fans of the dark side.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73493-557-8
Page Count: 221
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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