A short and often intriguing writing sampler from a Midwestern writer.
A debut collection spans a lifetime’s worth of poems, stories, and essays.
It takes a talented writer to maintain a consistent voice in a range of different forms, and Hurley does just that in this assortment of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, collected over the course of a long but sporadic writing career. The short story “The Broken Day of Bernie McCarville,” set in 1915, tells the tale of two men—an Iowa farmer haunted by his dead father and an itinerant coal shoveler who’s heading home to bury his sister—on a deadly collision course. Another, “The Second Drawer Revolver,” follows an opinionated 14-year-old, home alone for the first time, who’s forced to contend with a burglar. A series of vignettes, called “Encounters,” describes prominent figures that Hurley met during his life, including jazz legend Louis Armstrong, comedian Jonathan Winters, and even members of the British royal family. The poems address a number of topics, although aging, loss, grief, and death are recurring themes, as in “An Old Friend Dies”: “I am a hoarder of life, / a rejecter of strife. / When a friend-treasure dies, / denials of fact will arise.” Hurley’s animated language often holds readers close: “I have to warn you right away,” begins the aforementioned burglar story, which was published in a literary magazine in 1958. “I talk a lot—even for fourteen. My grandma says I must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.” The poetry feels somewhat more antiquated, with its sometimes-inelegant meters and rhymes, but it’s nonetheless surprising, as in “Two Slow Murders”: “The neighbor’s dog was killed last week. / A gray coyote snuck and slammed, / An act for which it’s closely diagrammed. / We heard both dog and old man shriek.” The best piece is an essay about seeing Robert Frost speak at Loras College when Hurley was a student there, in part because it explains so much of his own aesthetic. Overall, the author successfully manages to put his many talents on display.
A short and often intriguing writing sampler from a Midwestern writer.Pub Date: June 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66417-644-7
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Xlibris US
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Call it speculative or SF, fantasy or horror, this is fiction that keeps the reader off balance, unsure and nervous.
This collection of unsettling stories blurs the lines between dream and reality, life and death, human and not, Bradbury and Borges.
An award-winning fantasist who’s been compared to Kafka, Evenson combines matter-of-fact verbal precision with anything-goes conjecture. The strongest pieces here, such as the title story, leave it unclear whether they’re illuminating psychological disturbance or supernatural terror. A man remembers how his mother, on rare occasion, would tell him stories that would scare him in a way that no mother ever should. His mother has no memory of this, nor would anyone else think it likely of her. But now that he has a son of his own, he reluctantly takes the boy to visit his grandmother, and the man’s worst fears are realized. The reader must determine whether the protagonist has suffered a total breakdown or has been right all along. Following that is the even stranger “Vigil in the Inner Room,” in which a mother—there’s a lot of focus on mothers—orders her daughter, Gauri, to hold vigil at the bedside of the girl’s recently deceased father while her brother, Gylvi, stands guard outside the doors. Both of them know their roles, for they’ve done this each time their father has died, “several dozen deaths.” In “Untitled (Cloud of Blood),” a painting causes the death of anyone who has the misfortune to possess it, or maybe causes them to die by suicide, and keeps a tally of the deceased on the back of its canvas. Some stories are a little heavier-handed, more like science fiction parables, concerning climate change, class warfare, and the myth of free will. Some humans behave inhumanly while their bionic constructions have learned to develop (or approximate?) an ethical dimension.
Call it speculative or SF, fantasy or horror, this is fiction that keeps the reader off balance, unsure and nervous.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781566897099
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
