These tales of things that go bump in the night also pay tribute to the Choctaws’ preservation of their culture.
A chilling collection of stories about the tricksters and other beings of Choctaw lore who refuse to be forgotten.
When homicide detective Monique Blue Hawk thinks she’s encountering a deer in “Kashehotapolo: The Deer Man,” she makes a startling discovery: “It stepped into the clearing. Her jaw dropped. She looked lower and with a start realized that the buck did not have a deer head. She saw an old man’s face, furred like a deer, wrinkled and passive.” Kashehotapolo is one of the entities in the Choctaw pantheon, and Choctaw historian and writer Mihesuah explores the interactions of humans with these various beings in tales blending folklore with ghost stories, detective fiction, and other genres. Some are set in the years before and after the Chahtas, or Choctaws, were forced to leave their homelands and migrate west in the 1830s. Mihesuah explains in a note how the supernatural creatures in their belief system followed them west, too. Some, like the shampe—a version of Bigfoot—seem frightening but are harmless, while others are truly menacing. That includes the shape-shifting Elus Crow in “The Cornfield,” a story that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Stephen King collection. Alive for centuries, Crow, who’s an evil opa, or horned owl, preys on lost travelers who come upon his remote farm. His “helpful” directions to the main road always send them into one of his witch holes, the perfect place to keep them until he’s ready for his next meal. Some creatures, like the Little People, seem motivated more by mischief than malevolence. Others demonstrate a desire to protect Choctaw heritage, as one unfortunate young professor learns in “Tenure” after falsely claiming Choctaw lineage to further his academic career. The author’s years of research richly inform these tales, and she keeps the superlatives to a minimum—her subject matter is fantastic enough without them. Surprisingly, many of these stories resolve in satisfying ways, if not with an outright happy ending, and the author says in an introduction that “composing fictional stories about real-life histories allows me to create the endings that I want to see, and the act of facing scary cosmological creatures with a keyboard also gives me some control over what I fear.”
These tales of things that go bump in the night also pay tribute to the Choctaws’ preservation of their culture.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780806194677
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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