Consistently eerie tales that readers aren’t likely to forget.
A debut collection mixes horror and sci-fi—short stories laden with bizarre creatures, life on other planets, and homicidal proclivities.
In the title story, a doctor gets lost on his way to visit a sickly girl residing in a small, unknown village. It sufficiently captures the ominous atmosphere prevalent in many of the book’s grim tales, which typically feature an intangible fear. For example, the protagonist of “In the Garden” takes a train ride home only to discover his town of destination isn’t one of the stops and the engineer hasn’t even heard of it. This gloomy mood carries over to the sci-fi stories as well, most of which occupy the book’s latter half. In “The Worms of Titan,” scientists of the late 22nd century discover wormlike organisms on the planet Titan. But what’s truly unsettling is that the creatures are inexplicably identical to worms that have been on Earth for millennia. Biswas’ writing is unassuming but arresting: “Bolts of lightning shot across the darkness and, out of the macabre silence that hung over the valley, I heard a horrible wail.” He often establishes his narratives with traditional genre settings: a lighthouse in “The Crystal”; a castle in “Tramp”; and an outpost on that familiar red planet in “2038: A Mars Odyssey.” The memorable tales, however, trek into dark, sometimes-surreal territory. The main character in “Sedgefield’s Diary,” for one, is a Boston accountant who obsessively chronicles his humdrum life on an hourly basis. After he misses an entire day of recording his activities, his diary fills the pages seemingly on its own. Likewise, “The Lake of Flies” is, at first glance, a conventional tale of murder. But the killer and victim are immediately revealed, with the story then centering on the anticipation of the forthcoming homicide and its aftermath (Will the murderer pay for his crime?). The collection ends with “Puff,” which, contrary to its title, generates an explosive conclusion.
Consistently eerie tales that readers aren’t likely to forget.Pub Date: May 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945646-41-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rogue Star Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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