A collection of delightful and still relevant stories that certainly earns its resurrection.
Nine fantastical, oddly endearing short stories rescued from the ravages of time.
The late Fast (Greenwich, 2000, etc.) was a writer with a lot of roles, among them an activist against the Red Scare of the 1950s, which landed him a three-month prison sentence. He’s probably best known for writing the novel Spartacus (1951), which Stanley Kubrick famously adapted into the classic film. But he was also one of the most prolific authors of the 20th century, having written nearly 100 books, including both fiction and nonfiction as well as plays, poetry, and hundreds of short stories. Here, a collection of nine stories sharing fabulist tendencies, originally published in 1970, has been reissued, and it's well worth revisiting. The title story has the absurd humor of Catch-22, as a profane general brings down a real-life angel out of the skies over Vietnam. In “The Mouse,” the title character argues philosophy with a pair of visiting astronauts. “The Vision of Milty Boil” is a Kafkaesque satire on society; a small man brings the world down to his size through extraordinary effort and questionable justification. “The Mohawk” is very much an artifact of its time yet also timeless: A man named Clyde Lightfeather decides to meditate on the front steps of New York’s famous St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The prescient story “The Wound” seems familiar these days, as an absurdly dumb businessman proposes detonating atomic bombs underground to profit from mining oil shale. “Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal” is a literal devil’s bargain written with the wit and style of O. Henry. “The Interval” is a first-person reflection on age and time by a grieving widower. “The Movie House” is something of a Schrödinger’s cat quandary involving a locked door inside a theater and the projectionist who insists it can’t be opened. Finally, in “The Insects,” Fast ends with the apocalypse, initiated not by the dreaded Communists but by nature itself.
A collection of delightful and still relevant stories that certainly earns its resurrection.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-290844-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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