by Ken Brosky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 21, 2011
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Brosky’s darkly witty stories describe the major and mundane problems facing ordinary Midwesterners.
The young and youngish, mostly male, characters in Brosky’s stories find their personal, self-devised method for dealing with the world challenged by what life throws their way. The protagonist of “Deer Tales” impulsively stakes a major decision—whether to move back to his hometown or stay in the city and pursue a career as an artist—on his success at playing a deer-hunting video game in the lobby bar of a Holiday Inn, only to find that he’s terrible at it. The phone hacker in “The Phreaks” wins a hacking challenge by whistling payphone tones to trick the computer system—“Nines was in his own world, with his eyes closed, running his fingers along every naked space of Ma Bell’s back, treating her the way a really good guy does to a woman he knows he doesn’t deserve”—only to see a lesser hacker make off with the girl he likes due to superior social skills. In the best stories, Brosky exploits this disconnect with a sharp eye for detail and a fine sense of absurdity that’s both darkly funny and subtly tragic, as when one of the Four Horsemen pulls up to a Wisconsin coffee bar for a double shot of espresso in “Apocolypse Wow!” The preconceptions the story’s characters have about the End Times, whether credulous or skeptical, fail to prepare them for the grimly underwhelming, almost bureaucratic nature of the disaster they face. The polite, apologetic Horseman doesn’t have many answers to give the anxious baristas, just weary resignation, a presence that wilts vegetation and a golden scale he has no idea what to do with. Occasionally, Brosky’s satirical style gets the better of his storytelling, leading to flat characters like the cartoonishly oblivious Christian aid worker in Darfur, dropped into the middle of a realistically brutal view of the crisis there in “On the Tenth Day I Kept It Down.” More often, though, he gets the balance right. These stories about often-overlooked characters find sharp observations on the indignities of modern life.
Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1467974370
Page Count: 138
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ken Brosky
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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