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BRUTAL BEASTS

Transgressive, audacious tales steeped in gritty human struggles and otherworldly oddity.

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A volume of unconventional short stories features hardscrabble characters facing extraordinary circumstances.

North Carolina fiction writer and poet Buchner’s dazzling assortment of 18 tales offers a diverse cast struggling with some outlandish situations, both earthly and otherworldly. A man’s celebration of his wife’s pregnancy is cut short in the darkly humorous opener, “Made by Brutal Beasts.” Homer, a heavy-drinking child care company worker in therapy, becomes alarmed at his wife’s startling transformation into an excessively hirsute beast with prenatal “animalistic urges.” The theme carries forward with a different couple in the apocalyptic “Baby Teeth,” in which the pair’s “undead” newborn is anything but normal. Buchner experiments with form in “American Metal,” a sensory treat comprised solely of brutally vivid blog entries from a soldier deployed in the Middle East during wartime. The author also experiments with narrative brevity. Among the volume’s shortest tales is the marvelously morbid, two-page “Last Days at Wolfjaw,” which depicts a small family locked inside a cabin at the mercy of a plague of giant killer flies buzzing just outside the front door. Just spanning a single page is “About Future,” in which a man takes it upon himself to “put down” members of his own family who seemingly have outlived their usefulness to him. Conversely, the fantastically cinematic “Dracula Mountain” conjures a world dominated by vampires and the “nightwalkers” they create. A family tries to survive when a relative who’s “seventeen years old, but pale and skeletal” reappears. This story, along with several in the collection, disappoints only because it deserves a more fully realized treatment.

One of the assortment’s greatest assets is its sublime unpredictability. From junkies who donate plasma to the moving, tender father-son relationship in “Good Night,” the book crosses boundaries and traverses genres with seamless ease. Dominating these tales are themes of struggle and vulnerability, hardship and loss. Families buckle beneath the weight of grief, financial woes, or even supernatural forces, while others simply become prey to online entertainment, “drawn in like a wolf to raw meat.” Many characters are pensive and reflective only after the worst has occurred, while others recognize the fleeting nature of beautiful things as they “stayed awake past midnight and watched the fireworks from the balcony, content with all we didn’t know. A brocade crown filled the air with big hanging breaks of gold, slowly fading to right us. But beautiful things never last.” Buchner’s literary talents are on brilliant display. The prose he employs vacillates between raw descriptions of hungry teeth biting into greasy meat to lovely turns of phrase from brothers lamenting their father’s abandonment when they were young and how that affects their desire for children of their own. Nearly every tale has appeared in a variety of literary journals, and with good reason: They shimmer with the gloss of a creative imagination and enticing characterization. As the expectant father remarks in the opener, “Life was a horror movie, but only if you looked for it.” There is indeed mild, sunlit horror embedded in Buchner’s stories, but he also demonstrates a deep understanding of human nature and how it operates in times of desperation and when faced with the paranormal.    

Transgressive, audacious tales steeped in gritty human struggles and otherworldly oddity.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1-953610-31-7

Page Count: 195

Publisher: NFB Publishing

Review Posted Online: May 4, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022

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IF IT BLEEDS

Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.

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The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.

The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.

Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.

Pub Date: April 20, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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THE VERY SECRET SOCIETY OF IRREGULAR WITCHES

A magical tale about finding yourself and making a found family that will leave the reader enchanted.

A British witch takes a job as a magic tutor and finds the place she belongs.

Mika Moon's parents died when she was a child, and she's spent her entire adult life moving every few months, never staying in one place for long or getting attached to anyone. At 31, she’s been raised to keep magic secret; her sole contact with other witches is a small group she sees every three months, and she can't even text with them in between, as the group's leader thinks having too much magic in one place will draw unwanted attention. Mika does, however, do one thing that skates the edges of propriety: She posts online videos in which she "pretends" to be a witch: "Witchcore....Not quite as popular as cottagecore or fairycore, but it's up there." Then she gets an interesting request in her DMs, and Mika finds herself at Nowhere House, an old country estate, teaching three orphaned children how to control their magic. Suddenly surrounded by people who not only know her secret, but accept her for it, Mika is dangerously close to getting attached, both to the girls she’s teaching and to their caretakers, including Jamie, the cute librarian who didn't want to send for her. But with the clock ticking until an upcoming visit from a lawyer who's suspicious about the “unconventional household” and the witch rules Mika’s been raised with ringing in her ears, is this all just a bomb waiting to explode? The world Mandanna has created is exceedingly cozy and heartfelt, full of people bursting with love who have trouble expressing it due to trauma in their pasts. From the three magical girls to the elderly gay caretakers to the hot, young Irish librarian, each resident of Nowhere House is a lovingly crafted outcast reaching for family. Various threads laid out seemingly haphazardly through the story all come together in surprising ways in the last 30 pages for a finale worthy of the tale that preceded it.

A magical tale about finding yourself and making a found family that will leave the reader enchanted.

Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-43935-7

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

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