Bottom-line survival competes hard against issues of loyalty, friendship, and family in this disturbing, sometimes-ugly...
Criminals, lowlifes, and losers—many of them also quixotic romantics—people Harper’s first collection of short stories, which are set mostly in the Ozarks with side trips to cities like Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Detroit.
In the opener, “Agua Dulce,” a meth addict’s debt comes due and he realizes how far he’ll go to protect his child from his merciless dealer and his cronies in Aryan Steel, a group that makes the Aryan Nation look mild. Ironically, in a later story, “Heart Check,” a new prison inmate and Steel wannabe, recently convicted of killing a child, discovers that he may have misunderstood the Steel code. But in none of these stories is the moral code exactly mainstream, from “Prove It All Night,” about a 17-year-old Missouri girl whose robbery spree with her older boyfriend ends badly for him, to “Lucy in the Pit,” about a fight-dog trainer whose loyalty to a dog is tested by the animal's owner, to “Your Finest Moment,” about a policeman plotting revenge on a fellow cop he’s caught in bed with his girlfriend. Bar owner and retired rural gangster Jackie Blue is a minor character in the almost comic “I Wish They Never Named Him Mad Dog,” in which a nickname turns a loser into a tough into a dead body, and takes center stage in “Red Hair and Black Leather” when an enticing young woman asks for his protection against her biker ex; Blue may be old but he’s smarter and tougher than any other character in the book. Certainly smarter than the narrator of the title story, who sets a dog on his loved one, already bleeding to death from a bullet wound after a botched robbery, in order to save him. “Beautiful Trash” is set in a different but perhaps even more morally bankrupt milieu, celebrity-strewn LA, where covering up the stars’ dirty scandals is a business that can ruin more ordinary lives.
Bottom-line survival competes hard against issues of loyalty, friendship, and family in this disturbing, sometimes-ugly version of reality.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-239438-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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