Intriguing premises that fall short of their promise.
Whimsical premises and fantastical plots abound in this collection of short fiction.
Finnegan (Saving Frank Casey, 2008) was a lawyer before writing fiction, and his familiarity with bureaucracy and empty corporate jargon informs these lighthearted stories. The collection has a snappy specificity of place that pops off the page and lends it verve. Without belaboring a description, Finnegan’s reference to the “DramaScent” theatre system in the opening story, “Programming is Everything,” instantly places readers in a weird, futuristic world. At times, though, the particulars are a bit heavy-handed, as in “The Apprentice,” which features a “TV crew from the Jackal Network,” but Finnegan maintains a light touch and a quick wit. In almost every story, the everyday world of the characters is shaken by supernatural or spectacular phenomena. In “Alpha Text,” a research laboratory conducting a cross between time-travel experiments and cryogenics inadvertently clones Christ, while “Songs of the Sea” features what seems to be a kraken but turns out to be something more unexpected. Readers meet a chimpanzee robot, a lawyer who can kill people just by hating them, and what’s either a fallen angel or a psychedelic mushroom hallucination. Finnegan has a talent for coming up with impressive story ideas, but the collection mostly falters in executing those ideas. Though the stories fly by at an entertaining, readable clip, and Finnegan might be applauded for trimming the fat and cutting to the chase, they are more like brief sketches than fleshed-out stories, each ending before fulfilling its intriguing premise. The flat characters don’t help. For instance, after the research scientists discover they’ve brought back Christ, they debate the moral dimensions of their discovery for several pages before the drama promptly resolves itself without much payoff. No character makes a decision or changes in any significant way, and Finnegan tends to let them off the hook too easily. After asking interesting questions that another author might have turned into deeper stories, Finnegan seems content to put the pencil down and call it done.
Intriguing premises that fall short of their promise.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492189589
Page Count: 158
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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