At their best, these stories are sinister and beguiling in equal measure, tracing the border between fear and obsession and...
Horror blends with love, obsession, transformed bodies, and terrifying mysteries in this collection of stories.
Kiernan’s surreal and often unsettling fiction derives much of its power from the way it causes characters and readers alike to question reality via a shroud of narrative ambiguity. The best stories in this new collection channel this mysterious and haunting quality by invoking other creative disciplines. The protagonist of “Workprint,” a moody narrative abounding with menace, receives a mysterious film still that leads her to explore the world of special effects in the 1980s, hinting at a secret and unsettling cinematic history. A painter confronts inexplicable weather—indoor snow, specifically—in “Three Months, Three Scenes, With Snow.” Here, too, the protagonist searches for the answer to a question that defies logical explanation—always a warning sign in the realm of the uncanny. And opener “Werewolf Smile” brings together seemingly disparate elements—the legacy of the Black Dahlia murder, the slow dissolution of a relationship, and a centuries-old legend of lycanthropy—to produce a slow-building, genuinely disorienting work of horror. Other stories explore more fantastical realms. “— 30 —” follows one writer’s quest to overcome a severe case of writer’s block, which leads her to investigate supernatural remedies. In the end, though, the most memorable aspect of the story isn’t its foray into the paranormal but the elegiac quality it takes on as it explores questions of memory and sacrifice. And “Another Tale of Two Cities,” in which the narrator is transformed into a city by a microscopic civilization, brings together elements of body horror and science fiction in an unpredictable way.
At their best, these stories are sinister and beguiling in equal measure, tracing the border between fear and obsession and asking powerful questions about desire along the way.Pub Date: March 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59606-819-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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