An ambitious and provocative grouping of stories filled with peculiar characters.
A collection of short stories plumbs the depths of the human psyche.
Appel (Einstein’s Beach House: Stories, 2015, etc.) possesses a curiously sharp radar for eccentricity; this collection of short stories investigates the meaning to be found in the messiness of human affairs. In “The Punishment,” an aging musician seeks to rein in her wayward grandson, both spoiled and ungovernable. She recalls her own youthful transgressions and the severe punishments she met with and finds the dark inspiration to chasten her incarcerated daughter’s teenage child. “Boundaries” charts the lonely life of Phoebe Laroque, who works as a border patrol officer and every year has Christmas dinner with her partner, Artie Kimmel. She’s confronted one year with almost equally unsettling prospects: Artie falls in love with a woman suddenly and it’s not her, and a Pakistani attempts to cross the border with what seems to be a dangerous case of smallpox. In one of the two title stories, “Coulrophobia,” a family takes in a mime as a boarder, and his enigmatic presence releases its dysfunction. Some of the stories delve into complex philosophical themes, like “Counting,” in which two Census Bureau agents stumble on a couple living off the grid, averse to being counted, embracing a life that, in its anonymity, flirts with nonexistence. Despite the sometimes heavy themes and somber tone, Appel can be delightfully comedic, even downright silly. In “Saluting the Magpie,” an infant repeatedly swallows household objects, driving her parents insane with worry. After she consumes a penny, her father calls the number for poison control since the mother voices concern that copper is leaching into the baby’s system. The operator dryly asks what kind of penny. Sometimes, the stories feel like symbol-laden parables, and the lessons are too neat and didactic. The conclusion of “Magpie” seems facile: “Together, we watch the copper coin as it rests on my bare flesh, and I understand that we are both waiting for me to swallow it. That is what love is about, isn’t it? Swallowing the ingestible.” For such an unconventional collection, this glib moral seems incongruent. Overall, though, this is a gimlet-eyed and boldly original meditation on the weirdness of human nature.
An ambitious and provocative grouping of stories filled with peculiar characters.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62557-953-9
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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