An assortment of jolts, abominations, and shaken nerves that readers won’t soon forget.
The suburbs are a breeding ground for malevolent entities and hideous sights in this debut collection of horror short stories.
In “Green Eyes,” the first of 13 tales, an outcast at school lives alone with her mother. The two have an unusual remedy when one of them is sick, which only turns scarier as the story continues. Throughout this collection, the seemingly harmless either precedes something sinister or proves to be the source of horror. For example, Phil works at Darryl’s comic-book store in “Origin Story.” It’s hardly surprising when their conversations entail hypothetical superpowers, until it leads to a frightening reality. In the same vein, the tales’ settings are familiar, typically welcome places, such as a retail store, a nighttime beach, and a kids’ birthday party. Hawkins grounds so many of these stories by integrating relevant concerns, from low-income housing to body-image issues. Bullying, too, plays a part in some of the characters’ lives, including the blue-collar narrator of “Carpenter’s Thumb.” After he crushes his thumb with a hammer swing, his co-worker Carl laughs mercilessly, just one sign of the two men’s increasingly destructive relationship. Narratives will draw readers into characters’ mindsets; even when they’re nameless or they fear something intangible, it’s easy to tremble right alongside the players. That’s certainly true for Carol when her young daughter becomes obsessed with a cult children’s show in “The Stumblybum Imperative” (“The screen was awash with bright colors as the characters huddled in their costumes…Oversized heads made of felt and foam pressed together, barely fitting inside the frame”). Although Carol finds herself mesmerized as well, it’s still unsettling when one of the bubbly, plushy-costumed Stumblybums turns inexplicably erratic right there onscreen. The author’s pithy writing churns out chilling scenes that feed on suspense and don’t linger on the gory bits for long. Regardless, the book’s highlight is the potent, cringe-inducing “Storms of the Present.” In it, one person goes to terrifying lengths to lose weight—and that’s merely the beginning of a dark descent.
An assortment of jolts, abominations, and shaken nerves that readers won’t soon forget.Pub Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781937346126
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Coronis Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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
SEEN & HEARD
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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