An often creative and delightfully morbid literary collection.
An anthology of macabre stories and other pieces.
In his collection, Rice shows that he has a knack for the strange. His works often embrace horror, and they particularly shine when he leans into the disturbing. In the story “Eat,” Martina is judging a hot dog eating contest only to be mesmerized by a contestant who’s interested in another type of food. A similarly grotesque event occurs in “Horrorphone,” when a set of twins finds a box under their late father’s bed and the sound that emanates from it has strange effects on one of them. Alongside the terror, however, there are also moments of comedy, with a prime example in the collection’s first story, “Branch Manager,” in which an actual tree is hired as—you guessed it—an office branch manager, and its two human employees don’t trust it. In addition to some arboreal puns (“I bet he walks around after everyone leaves. Probably roots through people’s desks”), the absurdity of the plot adds appeal to the prose: “He had every right to go home just the same as any other employee. But he was a tree.” Some entries are innovative and experimental, including poetry as well as scripts, such as “Is That Weird?” which the author initially intended to pitch to the producers of the most recent reboot of The Twilight Zone,and “Nothing Would be Nicer,” a tale that includes a Seinfeld-inspired teleplay, complete with fictional advertisements. The poems offer readers pleasant changes of pace scattered throughout the collection; however, their language can feel bland at times. Another issue that sticks out is the fact that each piece is prefaced by explanation of why the author wrote it or what certain aspects are meant to signify; these are informative, but they leave little room for readers’ own interpretations.
An often creative and delightfully morbid literary collection.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9838547-5-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Red Hand Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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