Keeble does well with the land, less well with people.
Eight stories and one novella, linked more by place than theme.
The place is farming country outside Spokane, Wash., profiled in “The Fishers.” These small farmers are good neighbors, averse to gossip, resistant to change. Ed Erickson was typical, living through his kids, pained they wouldn’t want to succeed him. All this his widow Louise sees clearly. It’s an elegiac piece, not bad, but it lacks focus, like most of Keeble’s work, rambling off into a meditation on the struggle between fishers and porcupines. In “The Transmission,” Pete helps his Indian neighbor Louis, a trucker, with a balky thousand-pound transmission. The maneuvering distracts attention from the main event, the decision by Louis’s wife Bird to leave him and the wedge this drives between Louis and Pete. Louis pops up again in the best story, “I Could Love You (If I Wanted).” Here, Lola, a single parent, is caring for her dying mother while reluctantly fending off Louis, the consummate ladies’ man. Keeble keeps the focus on Lola’s ambivalence, and it pays off. Another recurring character is Jim Blood. We see him as a child in Saskatchewan in “Chickens,” then as a novice farmer in Washington in “The Chasm,” finally as an established landowner in the novella “Freeing the Apes,” which promises to be meaty; Jim’s neighbor, a female air force colonel, has been found dead. Foul play is suspected. But once again, we are distracted, this time by narrator Peter’s marital and other problems. It is also problematic that the violent climax, long building, occurs just offstage. In the title story, Fay Harper, a middle-aged widow with grown children, is heading to Alaska to scatter her husband’s ashes. She’s quit her job as a hospital nutritionist to work as a cook on an oil tanker—a decision Keeble describes merely as “driven by powerful obscurities.”
Keeble does well with the land, less well with people.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-8032-2777-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.
A gathering of short stories by an ascended master of the form.
Best known for mega-bestselling horror yarns, King (Finders Keepers, 2015, etc.) has been writing short stories for a very long time, moving among genres and honing his craft. This gathering of 20 stories, about half previously published and half new, speaks to King’s considerable abilities as a writer of genre fiction who manages to expand and improve the genre as he works; certainly no one has invested ordinary reality and ordinary objects with as much creepiness as King, mostly things that move (cars, kid’s scooters, Ferris wheels). Some stories would not have been out of place in the pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, with allowances for modern references (“Somewhere far off, a helicopter beats at the sky over the Gulf. The DEA looking for drug runners, the Judge supposes”). Pulpy though some stories are, the published pieces have noble pedigrees, having appeared in places such as Granta and The New Yorker. Many inhabit the same literary universe as Raymond Carver, whom King even name-checks in an extraordinarily clever tale of the multiple realities hidden in a simple Kindle device: “What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one—or a dozen, or a thousand—where he quit smoking, lived to be 70, and wrote another half a dozen books?” Like Carver, King often populates his stories with blue-collar people who drink too much, worry about money, and mistrust everything and everyone: “Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.” Best of all, lifting the curtain, King prefaces the stories with notes about how they came about (“This one had to be told, because I knew exactly what kind of language I wanted to use”). Those notes alone make this a must for aspiring writers.
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1167-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women’s lives and new ways to tell their...
A collection of stories unified in theme—the struggles of women claiming independence for themselves—but wide-ranging in conception and form.
The women who populate this collection from the novelist and essayist Gay (Bad Feminist, 2014, etc.) are targets for aggressions both micro and macro, from the black scholar in “North Country” who receives constant unwelcome advances and questions of “Are you from Detroit?” to the sisters brutally held in captivity while teenagers in the bracing and subtle “I Will Follow You.” Gay savvily navigates the ways circumstances of gender and class alter the abuses: “Florida” is a cross-section of the women in a wealthy development, from the aimless, neglected white housewives to the Latina fitness trainer who’s misunderstood by them. The men in these stories sometimes come across as caricatures, archetypal violent misogynist-bigots like the wealthy white man playing dress-up with hip-hop culture and stalking the student/stripper in “La Negra Blanca.” But again, Gay isn’t given to uniform indictments: “Bad Priest” is a surprisingly tender story about a priest and the woman he has an affair with, and “Break All the Way Down” is a nuanced study of a woman’s urge for pain in a relationship after the loss of her son. Gay writes in a consistently simple style, but like a longtime bar-band leader, she can do a lot with it: repeating the title phrase in “I Am a Knife” evokes the narrator’s sustained experience with violence, and the title story satirizes snap judgments of women as “loose,” “frigid,” and “crazy” with plainspoken detail. When she applies that style to more allegorical or speculative tales, though, the stories stumble: “Requiem for a Glass Heart” is an overworked metaphorical study of fragility in relationships; “The Sacrifice of Darkness” is ersatz science fiction about the sun’s disappearance; “Noble Things” provocatively imagines a second Civil War but without enough space to effectively explore it.
Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women’s lives and new ways to tell their stories.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2539-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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