Sharp, poignant, funny, and, above all, filled with the joy of invention—a must-read.
Seven long short stories that call into being worlds as fantastic as they are real.
As presaged by the title, the stories in Cotman’s fourth collection are splendidly strange. In “Weird Black Girls,” the narrator takes his ex-girlfriend on a trip to Boston, a tourist attraction ever since “the Rupture” in 1702 when “the settlement...rose like a finger pointing skyward to fix at a 45-degree angle above the earth,” an event supposedly caused by a Black witch named Annalee who may still roam Cambridge’s uncanny, and racist, streets. In “Things I Never Learned in Caitlin Clarke’s Intro to Acting Class,” the narrator takes a new lover, Leroy, only to discover that whenever they touch he’s transported back in time to inhabit Leroy’s body as he attends an acting class led by the real-life star of Dragonslayer. In “Tournament Arc,” two life-long best friends forced out of their jobs by Covid-19 and culture wars capitalize on their shared obsession for all things anime to run a LARP tournament that attracts a spectacular cast of combatants, most notably a sentient suit of “armor from precolonial Benin.” The stories are gleefully genre-busting in the style of Rion Amilcar Scott or Karen Joy Fowler, yet their invention is always grounded in the tangible struggles the characters face as they define their gender identities, their racial allegiances, and their right to be ordinary in a world that is realistically cruel. In the harrowing “Triggered,” for example, a story that’s markedly realist for this fabulist collection, the toxic relationship between two white Bay Area Occupy–affiliated activists unravels to reveal the depths of the destruction their performative allyship wreaks on the Black and brown communities they themselves have occupied. A reader, acclimated to the exuberant oddity that characterizes the majority of the stories, may find themselves waiting for the surrealist shoe to drop. When it does not and the story grinds to the habitual tragedy of its conclusion, the result is an epiphany about our shared American reality that is all the more startling for its brutal familiarity.
Sharp, poignant, funny, and, above all, filled with the joy of invention—a must-read.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781668018859
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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