Illness, loss and grief assume ingeniously arresting forms in this short-story collection from a uniquely gifted author who is also a practicing pediatrician and divinity-school student.
Adrian (The Children’s Hospital, 2006, etc.) once again voices the preoccupation with denying death that was so prominent in his sui generis debut novel, Gob’s Grief (2001). Nine often harrowing tales explore the darkness within children rendered older than their years with an intensity reminiscent of Ambrose Bierce and a penchant for fablelike indirection that echoes Angela Carter, with an occasional whiff of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s insistent symbolism. The obsessiveness of Adrian’s fiction reveals itself in recurrent narrative patterns. This method emerges clearly in “High Speeds,” which depicts an intellectually precocious boy coping with his father’s death in a plane crash (during a drug run), his nowhere mother and his deeply disturbed younger brother by concealing himself inside a rebellious fantasy world inspired by the loopy Martian adventure novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Similarly outré protagonists crop up frequently. “The Vision of Peter Damien” shows a boy who seems immune to illnesses afflicted by omens derived from the incidents of 9/11 (repeatedly channeled in several stories) that promise a cleansing apocalypse. In the title story, a grown man caring for his dying father is visited and abused by a quarrelsome angel. And in “Why Antichrist?” a boy hoping to commune with his dead father accidentally summons Satan instead. An overload of suffering little ones who develop similar otherworldly traits, plus numerous sets of twins and doppelgängers, edge the collection perilously close to risibility. But Adrian’s best pieces will haunt you unmercifully: “The Sum of Our Parts” (disembodied spirit of a suicide prowls the hospital ward); “Stab” (separated Siamese twin represses the loss of his brother by joining a deranged girl’s killing spree); and “A Child’s Book of Sickness and Death” (stories compiled by the surviving bearer of horrific birth defects).
Abrasive, accusatory, despairing and, more than often enough, quite unforgettable fiction.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-28990-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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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
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.
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A gathering of short stories by an ascended master of the form.
Best known for mega-bestselling horror yarns, King (Finders Keepers, 2015, etc.) has been writing short stories for a very long time, moving among genres and honing his craft. This gathering of 20 stories, about half previously published and half new, speaks to King’s considerable abilities as a writer of genre fiction who manages to expand and improve the genre as he works; certainly no one has invested ordinary reality and ordinary objects with as much creepiness as King, mostly things that move (cars, kid’s scooters, Ferris wheels). Some stories would not have been out of place in the pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, with allowances for modern references (“Somewhere far off, a helicopter beats at the sky over the Gulf. The DEA looking for drug runners, the Judge supposes”). Pulpy though some stories are, the published pieces have noble pedigrees, having appeared in places such as Granta and The New Yorker. Many inhabit the same literary universe as Raymond Carver, whom King even name-checks in an extraordinarily clever tale of the multiple realities hidden in a simple Kindle device: “What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one—or a dozen, or a thousand—where he quit smoking, lived to be 70, and wrote another half a dozen books?” Like Carver, King often populates his stories with blue-collar people who drink too much, worry about money, and mistrust everything and everyone: “Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.” Best of all, lifting the curtain, King prefaces the stories with notes about how they came about (“This one had to be told, because I knew exactly what kind of language I wanted to use”). Those notes alone make this a must for aspiring writers.
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1167-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SHORT STORIES | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER
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