Dawson (The Waking Spell, 1992) masterfully incorporates her central Texas characters into a magical, multigenerational, utterly mesmerizing struggle between good and evil. Back in the early 1920s, Grant Macafee's attraction to Sarah Ransom wasn't love, but a terrible sickness—that's what 500-pound recluse Victoria Ransom's old servant, Viola, tells her with absolute conviction. It was a passion that overwhelmed the sticklike body of the young Grant as he attended parties at the Ransoms' limestone mansion, a house paid for by the phenomenally successful ice business run by Sarah's and Grant's fathers. Entwined though the two families were through business concerns, Sarah refused to marry Grant, consenting only to an affair with him—until, pregnant, she fled her home, never to return. Enraged, Grant impulsively married the woman coveted by Sarah's amiable brother, William—but was humiliated a second time when his wife gave birth to William's child. Grant's fury extended to the entire Ransom family, and in his subsequent isolation it grew to an unalloyed reservoir of evil intent. As the decades passed, Ransoms began regularly to disappear or fall down dead, and the servant Viola begged William to destroy Grant and free the family from his curse. Gently reared William's equivocation in the face of such evil mirrored his country's contemporaneous waffling as Hitler's forces spread across Europe. A believer in the power of his own goodness, William was forced to witness much more—his eldest son's mysterious death, his grieving sister's collapse, his second son's murder—before he understood that the forces of evil had already won. It is William's granddaughter Victoria (the youngest and the largest of all the Ransoms) who, by writing down every monstrous detail Viola has told her, manages to defeat the demons and thereby free her own imprisoned soul as well. This hallucinatory tale grips the reader with its gothic undertones while seriously exploring the complexities of the human soul. Once again, Dawson proves herself an astonishingly accomplished novelist very early in her career. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56512-054-X
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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