A collection of a dozen new horror stories ranging from the clever to the tired, all with an undercurrent of graphic violence, some steeped in gore.
The very best of the batch may be the first. “The Press” is a fast-paced anecdote about an author who deals just revenge to savage reviewers. Other tales that borrow from childhood fables, like “Anka,” which owes a debt to the folklore villain Baba Yaga, add too little to their sources to be wholly successful. “The Burgers of Calais” is a predictable story that’s been told before; in fact, its title may give away its surprise about the secret behind the mystery meat in a local restaurant. Others, like “Camelot” and “Reflection of Evil,” seem to be incompletely separated twins circling around the same theme. “Sepsis” may please true gross-out fans, although readers less attuned to the physically macabre may wonder what motivates the lead character, and who’s likely to enjoy the lovingly described details of deviance. Still others depend more on their nonhorrifying details for whatever interest they generate, like the strange emotional quirks of characters in “Dog Days” and “The Scrawler.” With the final tale, “Sarcophagus,” and a fair number of others, readers will either get the point or not.
Given its uneven mix of offerings, this latest collection from Masterton (Petrified, 2011, etc.) ultimately confirms a hallowed rule of storytelling: the shorter, the better.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7278-6408-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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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
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES
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