For the Stephen King fan in the house: an author as capable, if a touch less prolific.
Atmospheric, sometimes-nightmarish tales by the ever macabre Evenson (Windeye, 2012, etc.).
What do you do when, in a waking dream—or, better, a dream from which waking seems impossible—you have to defend yourself from a spectral figure that’s flitting through your pad? If you’re one of Evenson’s characters, you might not have the resources or the will to keep a gun handy. And what good would a gun do against a ghost, anyway? So you grab, naturally, a book, “the largest and heaviest one in the stack,” and hope for the best. But does that shadowy, scary figure even exist? There’s the question. So it is that in one story in this collection, “Click,” its very title filled with ominous portent, the protagonist is suffering brain trauma and cannot remember something most terrible that he has done. But is he really damaged or just crazy or just imagining it all? Evenson leaves the reader guessing so that we’re not sure whether to be relieved or alarmed when the doctor gets ready to drill holes for the steel plate in the skull. Drills and other such tools are things to be worried about, of course, as are Evenson’s foreshadowings: when a character begins remembering how his dad deftly slaughtered a pig—“You pull the bastard up and hold it and don’t pay no mind to how it struggles”—then you know that nothing good can come of it. Evenson’s stories, small masterworks of literary horror, are elegantly tense. They operate in psychological territory, never relying on grossness or slasher silliness to convey their scariness; they’re more like the Japanese horror of Pulse than the sanguinary adventures of Freddy Krueger, though they have the same watch-between-the-fingers quality.
For the Stephen King fan in the house: an author as capable, if a touch less prolific.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56689-413-5
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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