Intriguing and unsettling in equal measure despite occasionally dreary dialogue.
A collection of short stories by brothers J.L. Salter and Charles A. Salter that centers on murder and the uncanny.
These 10 tales span multiple genres, including mystery and SF. The opening story, J.L. Salter’s “Buddies Forever,” is by far the most thought-provoking; it tells of Donague and Donahue, two soldiers who fight together in the Vietnam War. When a rookie accidentally pulls the pin on a grenade, one of the two main characters wakes up in an evacuation hospital with his eyes bandaged, but confusion about his identity leads to an unexpected revelation. Other stories by the same author present a wife whose husband may be poisoning her (“Murder on her Mind”) and a bedroom clock that’s mysteriously affecting time itself (“Time Conscious”). The stories by Charles A. Salter include “A Lousy Way To Rye,” a delirious first-person narrative about a bioterrorism attack; “That ASMR Girl,” about top-ranking officers mysteriously dropping dead at an Army base; and “The Caves of Lonesanne Blu,” set in an alternate reality in which Lord Oonain, a war veteran, has been sentenced to death. J.L. Salter writes gripping action, exemplified by a flashback in “Buddies Forever” in which the soldier remembers diving on the stray grenade: “Then the scene sped up to real time—as real as time gets in vivid dreams—and I shoved Donahue’s body out of the way before I grabbed my helmet and threw myself on top of the grenade.” Charles A. Salter’s prose has a boldly surreal edge, as demonstrated in “A Lousy Way To Rye”: “The worst day of my life began as I noticed my left arm falling off. Luckily it wasn’t my dominant one.” Neither author writes consistently snappy dialogue, however, and at times, the conversations can prove laborious: “ ‘Bill, we should visit Darren…maybe take a casserole or something.’ ‘I can pick up something at the deli tomorrow.’ ‘Tomorrow… right.’ ” Despite this weakness, the stories’ events are sufficiently curious and unnerving to make for compelling reading.
Intriguing and unsettling in equal measure despite occasionally dreary dialogue.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-65426-073-6
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
