by Jack Pendarvis ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2016
There are ghosts, too. At least, they seem like ghosts. Maybe they’re just wacky neighbors.
This collection of droll, wicked, and sometimes painfully funny stories, pastiches, and comic interludes could more appropriately have been titled something like “Stellar Screw-Ups On Parade.”
What’s also stellar is the manner in which Pendarvis, who has minted tales of the marginal, the weird, the hapless in such previous collections as Your Body is Changing (2007), somehow manages to be both caustic and compassionate in depicting his fumbling, comic characters. With most of these stories, he discloses how the movies, both in their myth and their melodrama, irradiate otherwise mundane or confused lives. In “Cancel My Reservation,” whose title is borrowed from a 1972 comedy that turned out to be Bob Hope’s last theatrical film, a small-town fellow who doesn’t seem to get out much decides he’s going to fly first class to Los Angeles to bid at an auction of Hope’s memorabilia. “They gave Chuck paddle 187, police code for murder,” the story relates in the sardonic tone that prevails over most of these tales. Chuck’s not exactly sure why he’s there beyond some impulse to snag an artifact for a friend who likes Hope. All one can safely say without spoiling things is that whenever you arrive in a strange place with no real direction, somebody will point you somewhere anyway, whether you like it or not. Similar unpleasant surprises happen to the sad-sack protagonist of “Jerry Lewis,” in which his search for a missing cat yields the realization that “he was happy being miserable. He was happy that living in Mississippi would give him a great excuse to be a failure.” Oh, and why is it called “Jerry Lewis?” Something to do with an open box of doughnuts, but that would be telling too much. And, as one might expect from such a collection, there’s a story called “Your Cat Can Be a Movie Star!,” in which another deluded dreamer seems to be one of those souls upon whom everything is lost. Such bleak hilarity may not be to everybody’s liking. But for those who have a taste for smoke-cured Southern droll, Pendarvis is among the more satisfying, laugh-out-loud absurdists a post-Millennial reader can ask for.
There are ghosts, too. At least, they seem like ghosts. Maybe they’re just wacky neighbors.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-938103-45-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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by Russell Banks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2013
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
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: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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by Louis L’Amour ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 11, 1999
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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