Unabashedly conventional horror tales with an understated but remarkable lead character.
Taylor’s (Pineapple, 2017, etc.) collection of linked short stories features a recurring protagonist who has a series of spooky encounters.
Kentucky is evidently a hub for spirit activity. At least, that seems to be the case for this book’s narrator, whose real name no character ever utters. In the opening tale, “Galen’s Mountain Child,” he’s only 10 years old when he and his older friend Galen search for a ghost that appears to be periodically calling out for help. In “Hey-hello/hey-goodbye/hey-weep-no-more,” Galen warns the teenage narrator of two high schoolers who had a fatal car accident about 20 years ago on prom night. Since then, 13 kids have died in similar accidents in that same allegedly wraith-cursed spot. The entries in this collection are chronological, unfolding during the 1960s and ’70s. The narrator eventually attends the University of Kentucky and works at the campus bookstore. While at UK, he sees apparitions in the stories “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Louie, Louie and the Blonde Hippie”; in the latter tale, he has the chance to thwart a potential serial killer. Not every story, however, has a ghost. In “Angel’s Wings,” the narrator hears voices on his staticky crystal radio, including Galen’s, who’s currently away in the Navy. Likewise, “Faithful Companion” is a humorous tale of his blind date, which heats up at a dentist’s office after hours. But the comedy is gleefully dark: When the dentist unexpectedly shows up, the narrator must hide in a closet—with a skeleton. Taylor primarily takes the traditional route with his horrorcentric tales. One of the collection’s tales, “The Perfect Ghost Story, Plus One,” addresses narrative tropes in ghost stories. A character lists conventions in a tale she relates to the narrator: “Mine is a legitimate ghost story, complete with doll motif, haunted house…mood, moral, warnings, turning point, and climax.” The author’s book is likewise filled with familiar horror imagery: There’s a string of creepy dolls in “I Am the Egg,” and the narrator investigates a haunted house in “Ms. Sylvia’s Home Cure.” There is, however, occasional repetition, such as several characters’ dying in car wrecks and the narrator’s experiencing plot-turning visions (often of someone who’s dead). But Taylor excels at establishing unnerving moods: At a séance in “Tacete,” the narrator recounts, “The hairs on my neck and forearm did a tiny dance. It was as if a gentle overhead air-conditioning had just started up.” The author’s greatest triumph is his protagonist. Even nameless, the narrator is distinctive. Readers, over the course of the stories, watch him move from a Catholic boarding school to college and endure such adolescent woes as his persistent virginity. Galen is equally diverting: Though his relationships with women rarely last, he has a soft spot for Louie, Louie, the Labrador mix he adopts. Throughout, Taylor has fun avoiding the narrator’s moniker: hobby-shop owner Max Howard of “I am the Egg” sifts through a handful of incorrect names while Sylvia simply calls him Bookstore.
Unabashedly conventional horror tales with an understated but remarkable lead character.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944697-75-4
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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