Evocative, compassionate, and exquisitely composed stories about the human condition.
Ten familial short fictions from the fertile mind of Wilson (Perfect Little World, 2017, etc.).
Wilson triumphantly returns to short stories, the medium of his first book, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (2009), ruminating once more on grief, adolescence, and what it means to be a family. The opener, “Scrolling Through the Weapons,” finds a guy and his girlfriend looking after some nearly feral nieces and nephews. The tricky bond between father and son is revisited in the stark “Housewarming.” A wife and mother who returns to her childhood home after her 82-year-old mother is assaulted makes a plethora of bad decisions in “A Visit.” Grief and regret run hand in hand in “Sanders for a Night,” in which a boy wants to cosplay as his dead brother, and the title story, in which a failing rock star takes advantage of his mother’s generous nature. There’s a rare misfire in the collection-ending “The Lost Baby,” which plays out as advertised, including a puzzling, ambiguous ending. But the book’s three portraits of young people are mesmerizing. In the collection’s best story, “Wildfire Johnny,” Wilson counterintuitively explores the nature of male maturity, cloaked in a horror story about a mystical razor that allows the user to travel back in time—if they slash their own throat. In “No Joke, This Is Going to Be Painful,” a restless young woman stuck in her small town finds redemption in pain: “We called them ice fights. They made things weird for a little while.” Finally, Wilson captures the insanity of adolescence in “The Horror We Made,” in which a bunch of teenage girls jacked up on Adderall, weed, and diet pills make a horror movie during a sleepover. One true confession within: “Every time I think I might not be friends with you guys anymore…I remember that I love shit like this and no one else would do it with me.”
Evocative, compassionate, and exquisitely composed stories about the human condition.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-245052-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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