Pathos and panic and penitence from one of the darkest and most singular minds in contemporary American lit.
Palahniuk (Beautiful You, 2014, etc.) comes roaring back from a stretch of experimentalism with 23 tales celebrating his ongoing affection for the macabre.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen Chuck at his most hard-core; he spent the last few years toying with satire, working his way into the heads of female narrators and curating the twisted anthology Burnt Tongues (2014). Here, he makes it absolutely clear that he’s still the man who wrote “Guts,” the infamous story that made fans pass out at readings. “The Toad Prince” makes “Guts” look like a fairy tale by comparison. It’s the story of an enterprising young pervert who has infected his member with a fistful of vile diseases in order to launch a new era in extreme body modification fetishism. “Romance” takes apart traditional relationships with the story of a chubby dude who falls in love with a superhot Britney Spears look-alike who may or may not be dimwitted on a level approaching disability. There are some echoes here—“Eleanor” is written in a strange, imitative patois that strongly recalls the novel Pygmy (2009), and a trio of fables resembles David Sedaris’ Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. But the core stories are pure muscle. The book opens with “Knock-knock,” about a son trying to save his father from death with dirty jokes. The best (black) comedy comes from “Zombies,” which finds America’s gifted teens indulging in the hot new fad of taking a defibrillator to their skulls. The purest horror comes from “Inclinations,” which begins with an adolescent girl using her unplanned pregnancies to collect Porsches from her parents before delving into a catalog of horrors at a sexual reorientation camp for teens. For fans, the book has “Expedition,” which contains Palahniuk’s first hints about Tyler Durden’s true nature in advance of the upcoming Fight Club 2, to be released as comic books starting soon.
Pathos and panic and penitence from one of the darkest and most singular minds in contemporary American lit.Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53805-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Comic novel set in a small town in Texas from the author of Night of the Avenging Blowfish (1994) and Begin to Exit Here (1992). The title—inspired by the game show Wheel of Fortune—is the one English phrase that Alfredo Santayana, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, knows. He's hiding in an abandoned house just outside of Waxahachie, Texas, and, as the story begins, the innocent Alfredo is about to become a suspect in an investigation of satanic practices. Little Eva Galt, a minister's kid, spies on him and then befriends him. Meanwhile, another preacher's kid, Kenlow, begins drawing pentagrams around the countryside and leaving whatever fresh meat he can find—beef liver, Vienna sausage—as evidence of ritual sacrifice. The sheriff would just as soon laugh the matter off, but then Eva finds a skeleton, suggesting what may be a real case of satanic sacrifice. The local media get hold of it. An evangelical preacher embraces the issue. Someone claims to have seen the Virgin Mary reflected on the surface of a post office stamp machine; the stamp machine is stolen. And, in still another skewed expression of religious fervor, a painter reproduces drawings from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of the local food mart. It truly seems as though some kind of wacky conspiracy is at work, but then Eva spots Kenlow at his mischief, clearing up much of the mystery. Alfredo even becomes a hero, and, green card in hand, gets a job scooping up smashed armadillos from the highway. Welter goes for laughs, and often gets them—his kids here, in particular, are charming, as they speculate upon the utility of prayer or troll for catfish at the local sewage lagoon. On the other hand, Welter uses such a broad brush that he's never truly satirical, and his quintessential small town is both too idealized and dumbed-down to be believable. A Tom Bodett wannabe.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1996
ISBN: 1-56512-118-X
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A posthumous gathering of tales by the noted Cuban-American writer (The Old Gents, see below). Yglesias (191995) was an accomplished novelist who, judging from the pieces in this collection, his first and only, used the story form mainly to explore in miniature the themes that supported the more graceful architecture of his novels. Indeed, the last story here, ``An Idea for a Story,'' reads like a rough draft of his final novel, The Old Gents. Running throughout are the key motifs of his body of work, the debt owed to youth by age, the struggle to hold onto the political fervor of one's early years and, most of all, the tensions between Latino and non-Latino in the contemporary US, often as played out in a single person's identity. The best of these stories, ``The Place I Was Born'' and ``An Idea for a Story,'' have a wry, droll humor that serves to underline rather than undercut their basic seriousness. Other entries, particularly the title piece (a tale of a good, gray liberal whose son is involved in the 1968 Columbia University uprising), and ``In the Bronx'' (in which a middle-class Latina is forced to come to grips with her roots in the barrio) are weighed down with topical references that date awkwardly. For all the obvious sincerity of his political commitments, Yglesias is most inspired when writing about the micro-politics of family life and sex, as in ``Celia's Family'' and ``The Place I Was Born.'' It is useful to have his stories collected in one volume, but it's also clear that Yglesias was always a more effective writer when he worked on a larger canvas.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55885-182-8
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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