Twelve well-paced stories straddling the line between parody, magical realism, mystery, and farce.
Palma, a Spanish writer best known here for the Map of Time trilogy (The Map of Chaos, 2015, etc.), returns with a book of imaginative stories.
In "Snow Globe," one of the stronger tales, a traveling encyclopedia salesman masquerading as the dead son of a senile and grief-stricken elderly woman describes the title item as "a toy world that obeys its own laws….Everything inside it works differently." It's a metaphor for the story at hand, but it could also apply to the book overall. "The Karenina Syndrome" unfurls an enigmatic tale about a man's dread of Sunday dinners with his wife's family into a domestic thriller centered around a love letter bookmarking his in-laws' tattered copy of Anna Karenina, deftly recalibrating the book's themes into something new and alarmingly grotesque. "Roses Against the Wind" expands a similar premise of how little family members actually know about one another into a fantastical meditation on compassion and escapism. But the title story—about a wealthy man who gives his wife pieces of his body over the course of their marriage—is indeed the standout and is practically dripping with black comedy and potential interpretations. Are the eyes, appendages, and limbs passed across the table over lavish dinners indicative of unbridled affection or "an act of tremendous egotism...akin to giving the church the clothes you no longer wear"? In Palma's tales, lecherous co-workers inevitably steal jilted wives waiting at the foot of a staircase with their suitcase, work crushes wind up the talismanic muses of magical figurines—all evoked with an onslaught of metaphor and simile that hits the nail so hard and so frequently that, in aggregate, they have some trouble signifying. Palma has a piercing imagination hampered only by plots that are borderline contrived and an unchanging narrative voice.
Twelve well-paced stories straddling the line between parody, magical realism, mystery, and farce.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6404-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For his 17th horror novel, Herbert goes back to Haunted (1989) to recover his footing after some weaker tries to scare the reader. Returning is alcoholic psychic investigator David Ash, who suffered a nervous breakdown following his stay at the crumbling Edbrook mansion. Here, Ash is still haunted by Edbrook's ghosts as he investigates a new uprising of the paranormal at the hidden village of Sleath. Even readers who scoff at gooseflesh may get the creepy-crawlies as Herbert lets out all stops but keeps his ghostland hyperbole to a midrange level. Ellen Preddle sees her 11- year-old son, Simon, who drowned in the bathtub, still lurking about the house. Why? Well, in part, as Ash discovers, because Simon's father, who abused him sexually and died a year before him in a strange haystack fire, is also still aroundthough now black and crumbling from his incinerationand won't let Simon move on to the next world. Ash finds that Sleath is spiritually dominated by the Lockwood clan, whose evil goes back to the Crusades, black arts imported from Egypt, and whose members more recently gave birth to the Hellfire Club. Ash falls for Grace Lockwood, a sometime psychic like himself, who can read his haunted mind when they make love. But Grace too is haunted at a genetic level by her ghastly family, and uncovering Grace's past becomes the novel's pivot. Meanwhile, Sleath itself is invaded by many more horrors, one of the neatest of which is two sets of floating body parts trying to reassemble themselves so they can couple in midair. Other bloody eruptions follow, including an especially grisly bit about a poacher who falls on one of his own arrows and...well, you'll find out. Familiar stuff, working toward Sleath's invasion by a flesh- mist, but page by page Herbert grips by anchoring us into his skeptical psychic investigator.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-105210-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
A debut collection weaves several narratives into one richly defined (if oddly static) tapestry portraying the history and obsessions of a troubled Jewish intellectual family. Ruth Klingle, the narrator, stands at the center of most of the ten pieces here. A young mother who grew up in suburban New Jersey, she is married to her old high-school headmastera vicious Dickensian bigot who in his fits of rage and paranoid racism isn't able to show us what could have attracted Ruth to him in the first place. We learn early on that Ruth's father molested her on a regular basis throughout her childhood, and that her mother learned of this many years later, to her great consternation and chagrin. Ruth's own feelings about it are submerged and surface only obliquely, mainly in response to her husband's perpetual rantings against the left-wing politics of her family. ``It was true, I thought: liberals are irresponsible, self-indulgent people. I would no longer be like them, no longer be the daughter of those Jews who marched and sang.'' Motive and explanation, however, are not part of the economy of these tales, which seem to be extended exercises in portraitureprecise, restrained, and ultimately rather precious (``His appendix burst slowly, almost gracefully....He had felt it: the rush of liquids, then the onslaught of life, which is pain''). There is a real skill present in the interweaving of one piece with another, all of them interrelated as evidently and problematically as the members of Ruth's family, although the narrative that emergesrevolving around incest, genocide, madness, and homosexualityis somehow dragged down by the heaviness of the prose and the intricacy of the descriptions. An overly ambitious start from a talented beginner.
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 1995
ISBN: 1-882413-19-9
Page Count: 168
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
