Call it speculative or SF, fantasy or horror, this is fiction that keeps the reader off balance, unsure and nervous.
This collection of unsettling stories blurs the lines between dream and reality, life and death, human and not, Bradbury and Borges.
An award-winning fantasist who’s been compared to Kafka, Evenson combines matter-of-fact verbal precision with anything-goes conjecture. The strongest pieces here, such as the title story, leave it unclear whether they’re illuminating psychological disturbance or supernatural terror. A man remembers how his mother, on rare occasion, would tell him stories that would scare him in a way that no mother ever should. His mother has no memory of this, nor would anyone else think it likely of her. But now that he has a son of his own, he reluctantly takes the boy to visit his grandmother, and the man’s worst fears are realized. The reader must determine whether the protagonist has suffered a total breakdown or has been right all along. Following that is the even stranger “Vigil in the Inner Room,” in which a mother—there’s a lot of focus on mothers—orders her daughter, Gauri, to hold vigil at the bedside of the girl’s recently deceased father while her brother, Gylvi, stands guard outside the doors. Both of them know their roles, for they’ve done this each time their father has died, “several dozen deaths.” In “Untitled (Cloud of Blood),” a painting causes the death of anyone who has the misfortune to possess it, or maybe causes them to die by suicide, and keeps a tally of the deceased on the back of its canvas. Some stories are a little heavier-handed, more like science fiction parables, concerning climate change, class warfare, and the myth of free will. Some humans behave inhumanly while their bionic constructions have learned to develop (or approximate?) an ethical dimension.
Call it speculative or SF, fantasy or horror, this is fiction that keeps the reader off balance, unsure and nervous.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781566897099
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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