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ALL WE COULD HAVE BEEN AND MORE

A collection of short but memorable narratives that rupture the illusion of personhood.

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Shaw considers alternate modes of existence in this debut collection of literary short stories.

A woman—who may be controlled by a zombie ant fungus—invites her ex-boyfriend over for a late-night reconciliation (“Zombie Ant Fungus”). A parks and wildlife employee is forced to take a bear into her home when there’s no more room in the woods only to realize, a few weeks into the stay, that the “bear” is actually just a man in a bear suit (“Parks and Wildlife”). A zombie, reanimated for the purpose of serving as a crash test dummy, falls in love with his zombie co-pilot, Jane, over the course of several catastrophic drives together (“Crash Test Zombies”). From Dungeons and Dragons clerics to reluctant pit fighters to body-snatching aliens pretending to be human, the characters in these 16 stories press up against the walls of their realities, probing for those places where recognizable humanity turns into something less familiar. In “Bed Just Right,”a family’s suburban home is rendered an exotic museum when their creepy neighbor sneaks in and begins examining their things: “He wonders if Stan’s and Tamar’s toothbrushes are still damp from their morning brushings. He goes downstairs, runs his thumb over bristles. One is moist. The other is dry. The dry toothbrush’s bristles are squashed, flattened, stiff with old paste. Interesting, he says. Very interesting.” In the title story, an inventor devises a way for him and his wife to be the best possible versions of themselves only to realize it will be different versions of themselves who will actually get to enjoy it. Such what-ifs, inversions, and revisions populate the author’s stories, each presenting the world anew in all its vivid, lovely, awful glory.

Shaw’s tales range from dark surrealism to offbeat comedy. The prose is uniformly tight and clever, as in “Gilman,” which opens with the Creature from the Black Lagoon receiving an invitation to visit a retired ichthyologist: “The Gill-man contemplates his lair—a dank, murky cave. He owns little: a boulder, a puddle of fish offal, some chewed-up crocodile bones. He has always wanted to visit Florida.” “Hallmark Christmas Movies (2013-2020)” is composed of a series of unhinged descriptions of potential movies poking fun at the channel’s established holiday format: “Jake refers to her, the woman with no time for love, as ‘Little Miss Mediocre.’ Not to her face, of course. Except that one time. One time too many.” The author has a gift for concision—the stories are on the shorter side, some only a page or two in length. The more playful, premise-driven pieces tend to be the strongest, though some of the more serious stories, like “Wicked Source of Light,” are quite powerful. Readers will be reminded of the work of George Saunders, though Shaw’s stories have a weirder, less reassuring tone. He veers from familiar to alien or alien to familiar in a way that keeps his audience from ever growing too comfortable, fostering a propulsive sense of unease that carries the reader on to the next strange episode.

A collection of short but memorable narratives that rupture the illusion of personhood.

Pub Date: July 19, 2023

ISBN: 9781604893472

Page Count: 138

Publisher: Livingston Press

Review Posted Online: May 11, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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THE WOMAN IN SUITE 11

An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.

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Travel writer Lo Blacklock is back. Ten years after the events of The Woman in Cabin 10 (2016), she's attending the opening of a lavish Swiss hotel when, once again, a mystery intervenes.

A decade after she almost died on a luxury cruise and ended up exposing a murder plot, travel journalist Laura “Lo” Blacklock is trying to get back into the business post-Covid-19 and post–maternity leave. When she's invited to an exclusive hotel launch by the Leidmann Group on the shores of Switzerland’s gorgeous Lake Geneva, her supportive husband, Judah, insists that she should go, and her old boss, Rowan, says that if Lo can score an interview with the reclusive Marcus Leidmann, she’ll publish it in the Financial Times. Leaving Judah and the kids at home in New York, Lo is surprised by a last-minute upgrade to first class, which kicks off her trip in style. The hotel is appropriately awe-inspiring in both scenic location and effortless luxury, and Lo starts to put the memories of last trip’s trauma behind her, thinking that maybe she can just enjoy the experience this time. But then, at dinner, she's surprised to see at least three guests who were also on that original cruise, and when she finds a mysterious note in her room saying "Please come to suite 11 as soon as possible," she gets another shock. To quote William Faulkner, she realizes that “the past is never dead,” and soon Lo is careening across Europe on her way to England, only to find herself embroiled in another murder. The back half of the novel offers her the opportunity to continue her amateur sleuthing, and while she avoids much of the physical danger that plagued her on the cruise a decade ago, she is in very real legal trouble. This is the prolific Ware’s first sequel, and it's fun to spend time with Lo again, as she's both savvy and kindhearted. Unfortunately, the mystery is not as atmospheric and gripping as usual for Ware, though even a lesser Ruth Ware thriller is still worth reading.

An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.

Pub Date: July 8, 2025

ISBN: 9781668025628

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025

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