An indelible batch of nightmarish tales.
Playing games to conjure spirits and demons leads to horrifying consequences in MacKenzie’s debut short story collection.
In the opening “The Elevator Game,” high schooler Alice tests a Korean urban legend that asserts that pressing a particular sequence of elevator buttons will take a passenger to another dimension. But, as with most of the characters in these tales, Alice isn’t prepared when the activity takes a sinister turn. Each of these eight works feature people playing similar games, such as the popular Bloody Mary myth, which involves repeating the titular woman’s name in a mirror. All supply readers with the requisite rules, and recurring imagery, such as candles and mirrors, appears in many tales. MacKenzie also ties her stories together with profound themes; many of the women characters, for example, suffer from loneliness even when surrounded by friends or family members. Likewise, when characters summon ghosts or demons, the creatures often evoke the summoner’s internal despair, such as a Harvard University grad student’s dark secret in “The Telephone Game.” Some tales include characters that are already well acquainted with the supernatural, such as a girl who lives in a haunted house and a former Wiccan who once had powerful psychic abilities. The author unusually grounds the final tale in realism, asserting that it’s a true account of her teenage years, involving a menacing ghost and a Ouija board. However, the book’s chilling standout is “The Hide-and-Seek Game,” which draws on a Japanese urban legend. In it, a Minneapolis house- and dogsitter plays a game with a creepy, spirit-possessed doll, with predictably unnerving results. Throughout, MacKenzie’s concise prose style generates sharp images; for example, in “Telephone,” which takes place in a pre-smartphone setting, Anna and her friends brace themselves for the scary activity to begin: “Ten flip phones creaked open, and ten thumbs hovered over the green call button, waiting.”
An indelible batch of nightmarish tales.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Gravestone Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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