Short, enjoyable and absurd—a pleasant Halloween treat.
This collection of three short stories ranges from hillbilly humor to playful horror à la Tales from the Crypt or Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
First-time author Campbell opens with “Michelle’s Ghost,” an amusing little tale about a big spider problem. More an extended anecdote than a short story, it refuses to take itself seriously—an endearing quality that pervades the tales. The far more substantial Duncan’s Passion is a novella with solid, empathetic characters and replete with chapters and even an epilogue. There are two characters named Duncan: One is the son of the main protagonists, Tom and Tammy; the other is Tammy’s distant ancestor, one of a number of ghosts haunting the farmhouse the family has inherited. This brief narrative involves pictures falling of their own volition, pirate treasure, the ground opening up, an evil lawyer, mojo, and feuding, cutlass-wielding ghosts. It’s all told with carefree good humor and filled with snarky wisecracks—“Something tells me I ain’t in Kansas no more”—and Halloween imagery: “O’Connor was lying under a large metal shelf with only his head sticking out. His tongue was swollen and his eyes were popped out and resting on his cheeks.” The final story, “Fiddling Blue Billy and His Bigfoot Wife,” has nothing to do with ghosts, but it’s a rollicking bit of good ol’ hillbilly funnin’ reminiscent of Vance Randolph’s Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales (1976). This first-person tale tells of a 6-year-old’s visit to his gigantic relatives Billy and Em. It’s filled with Appalachian flavor: “She’s just dumber’n a hoe handle.” Billy is blue from methemoglobinemia, a disorder that actually exists, while Em is from a different race of humans, hidden in the woods and covered with hair, that probably doesn’t exist. The nonsense mounts until Em takes an unnatural shine to the 6-year-old narrator, then all hell breaks loose.
Short, enjoyable and absurd—a pleasant Halloween treat.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500422608
Page Count: 96
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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