A collection of short but memorable narratives that rupture the illusion of personhood.
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
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.
The 25th novel featuring Silva’s legendary protagonist.
During his intersecting careers as art restorer and Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon has tangled with Russian gangsters and al-Qaida terrorists. He has become well-acquainted with operatives in multiple security agencies and befriended a paid assassin. He has busted art thieves and created passable forgeries by Renaissance masters and abstract Modernists. This latest installment centers around his relationship with the pope and a newly discovered painting by Leonardo da Vinci that has gone missing from the Vatican. Silva’s novels tend to fall into two categories: books that reflect the politics of the day and books that don’t. His latest is one of the latter, which could be a treat for readers looking for escape, but it falls flat for a variety of reasons. Luxury has always been part of Gabriel Allon’s universe. It used to be an aspect of tradecraft, though. Allon would be wearing a very expensive suit and driving a very expensive car because he was posing as a client at a Swiss bank. Here, his wife is hosting a catered lunch for 150 of their daughter’s classmates in their apartment overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. What once felt like a scintillating peek into the world of the obscenely wealthy now just feels…kind of obscene. Similarly, Allon goes chasing after a missing painting as a civilian—he retired from Mossad in Portrait of an Unknown Woman (2022)—the same way another man his age might buy a speedboat or get hair plugs. As the story progresses, the stakes are raised, but it’s hard to forget that Allon is now a middle-aged man pursuing a dangerous hobby, rather than a spymaster leading his intrepid team to prevent a disaster that will disrupt the global order.
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780063384217
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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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