An enjoyable compilation of dark tales for readers who prefer twist endings.
Stephens’ debut collection offers stories and vignettes set in post-apartheid South Africa and featuring dark, punchy conclusions, as well as unrelated poems of love, introspection, and spirituality.
A love poem, “Ode to Kathy,” featuring images from astrology, astronomy, and religion, opens the volume. Other verses vary in subject matter and structure but have little to do with the macabre, except perhaps “Traffic,” about a man hoping to take out a carjacker. Although the poems don’t really fit the collection’s overall theme, they don’t detract from the quality of the stories that do. In “Ali Fafi—You Stupid Man,” a lazy, despotic village chief hears a recurrent thumping ostensibly caused by animals but which actually has a more sinister source. In keeping with the tradition of the horror genre, bad things happen to innocent people in these tales. In “No Drinks for Free,” for instance, a Soweto man who enjoys a simple but happy lifestyle—in part due to his father’s pension—contrives to keep the checks coming after his dad’s death; however, it’s a plan that holds grim consequences for a hapless drunk. In other stories, however, evil gets its just deserts; in “The Transplant,” for example, a nurse uses trickery on a racist heart-transplant patient. Stephens’ light, breezy style (“Life was, indeed, really good for Joseph Shadrack and his wife, Jasmine”) nicely counterpoints the grim subject matter, and it’s similar in tone to such masters of suspense as Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock. Overall, the tales in this collection can be enjoyed by all readers, but some will have an added dimension for those who are well-versed in South African culture. A few intricate stories, such as “Political Games” and “The Mugging,” offer specific commentary on South African politics.
An enjoyable compilation of dark tales for readers who prefer twist endings.Pub Date: June 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4828-0755-4
Page Count: 162
Publisher: PartridgeAfrica
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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