by Cai Emmons ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2020
With an ominous air and well-crafted prose, Emmons’ stories are both immersive and challenging.
Five women must reckon with quietly unsettling shifts in their lives as they navigate unexpected changes.
Set in the Northeast United States—Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York—novelist Emmons’ (Weather Woman, 2018, etc.) first short-story collection centers on women who are surprised by something in their lives. In "The Deed," an attorney and mother of young twins comes home to find a man in her house insisting he owns it, treating her like a confused person who should be pitied. In "Fat," a young art student has strong negative feelings about the model in her drawing class as well as her own body, and the corporeal drama escalates to an alarming pitch. In the title story, a middle-aged woman visits her childhood best friend, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, on her birthday. In "Redhead," a woman whose college ex-boyfriend’s wife has died in her early 20s befriends the dead woman's mother by lying to her. In "Her Boys," a middle-aged woman who runs a magazine feels a maternal ownership over her young male employees, but it becomes clear that she does not see anyone around her as they are. Throughout the stories, each woman is preoccupied with appearance, both physical and social. The language in the collection is poetic in its imagery: “sunlight popping off so many surfaces, appearing unexpectedly through the branches like flashing blades.” But that flowery language can also come off as judgmental and contrived: “Her hair was an unfortunate light rust-red, a shade that…faded in summer to a grandmotherly gray-ish orange, and always suggested the possibility of a histrionic character or white trash origins.” The characters’ obsessions with their own and others’ bodily appearances are often disturbing, especially in "Fat," in which the fat character is a strange cross between cautionary tale, inspiration, and object of fixation. “Her private parts were concealed, but to Tasha Jane’s entire body was one massive private part.” None of the characters are very likable, and many are unreliable, but Emmons is a skilled storyteller when it comes to psychological drama in seemingly ordinary lives.
With an ominous air and well-crafted prose, Emmons’ stories are both immersive and challenging.Pub Date: March 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948585-08-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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