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THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2002

Name: THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2002
Author: Larry Dark
ISBN: 0-385-72162-5

edited by Larry Dark ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 2002

Perhaps this is the way of things with fiction anthologies: lots of skill and nothing to rock the boat. It doesn’t...

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Twenty pieces of the year’s crop of short fiction that never fail to deliver what is expected but rarely take us anywhere but the expected.

The O. Henry series works thus: the editor, Dark this year, collects what is presumably some of the best fiction in the land and then a panel of three respected writers vote for their favorites. The winners are ranked one, two, and three, and each jury member writes an introduction for one of them. This time, a trio of heavy-hitters, Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colson Whitehead, are on board. Oates’s winner, “The Ceiling,” by Kevin Brockmeier, is a real corker about a town where a giant burnished thing—simply called “the object”—has appeared in the sky and is inexorably bearing down upon those who dwell there. Eggers and Whitehead fare less successfully with, respectively, a strong-starting fizzler about a gay musician reuniting with his ultra-Christian family in Texas (“Scordatura,” by Mark Ray Lewis) and a manufactured piece of Minnesota drama (“The Butcher’s Wife,” by Louise Erdrich). The inspiration for last year’s film Memento is included here—“Memento Mori,” by Jonathan Nolan—and it’s a good thing, too, as this is a collection that desperately needs a shot of twisty and inventive pulp. Despite how much solid and talented writing is on display, from Richard Ford’s serene “Charity” to David Foster Wallace’s chatty “Good Old Neon,” there is also a serious lack of much that’s terribly exciting or new. Passion? Experimentation? Good taste and the artfully constructed sentence rule here, and putting a trio of big names at the front of the book can’t change that reality.

Perhaps this is the way of things with fiction anthologies: lots of skill and nothing to rock the boat. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one wouldn’t enjoy reading the collection; it’s just that there’s little to make the reading of it a necessity. (For comparison’s sake, see Miller, below.)

Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2002

ISBN: 0-385-72162-5

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STORY PRIZE
edited by Larry Dark

- BOOK REVIEW
PRIZE STORIES 2001
edited by Larry Dark

- BOOK REVIEW
PRIZE STORIES 2000
edited by Larry Dark

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PRACTICAL MAGIC

by Alice Hoffman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 14, 1995

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Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic—it blinds you with fairy dust. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. They've seen the evidence for themselves in the besotted behavior of the women who call on the two aunts for charms and potions to help them with their love lives. The aunts grow herbs, make mysterious brews, and have a houseful of—what else?—black cats. The two girls grow up to flee (in opposite directions) from the aunts, the house, and the Massachusetts town where they've long been shunned by their superstitious schoolmates. What they can't escape is magic, which follows them, sometimes in a particularly malevolent form. And, ultimately, no matter how hard they dodge it, they have to recognize that love always catches up with you. As always, Hoffman's writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won't let you get away. But it's just too hard to believe the magic here, maybe because it's not so much practical magic as it is predictable magic, with its crones and bubbling cauldrons and hearts of animals pierced with pins. Sally and Gillian are appealing characters, but, finally, their story seems as murky as one of the aunts' potions—and just as hard to swallow. Too much hocus-pocus, not enough focus. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)

Pub Date: June 14, 1995

ISBN: 0-399-14055-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE INVISIBLE HOUR
by Alice Hoffman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BOOK OF MAGIC
by Alice Hoffman

- BOOK REVIEW
MAGIC LESSONS
by Alice Hoffman

- BOOK TO SCREEN
HBO Max Wins Film Rights to Lyla Lee YA Novel

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NIGHT SHIFT

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 20, 1977

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Twenty New England horror shorts by Stephen King (and a painfully lofty introduction by old pro John D. MacDonald). King, of course, is the 30-year-old zillionaire who poured the pig's blood on Carrie, woke the living dead in 'Salem's Lot, and gave a bad name to precognition in The Shining. The present collection rounds up his magazine pieces, mainly from Cavalier, and also offers nine stories not previously published. He is as effective in the horror vignette as in the novel. His big opening tale, "Jerusalem's Lot"—about a deserted village—is obviously his first shot at 'Salem's Lot and, in its dependence on a gigantic worm out of Poe and Lovecraft, it misses the novel's gorged frenzy of Vampireville. But most of the other tales go straight through you like rats' fangs. "Graveyard Shift" is about cleaning out a long unused factory basement that has a subbasement—a hideous colony of fat giant blind legless rats that are mutating into bats. It's a story you may wish you hadn't read. You'll enjoy the laundry mangle that becomes possessed and begins pressing people into bedsheets (don't think about that too much), a flu bug that destroys mankind and leaves only a beach blanket party of teenagers ("Night Surf"), and a beautiful lady vampire and her seven-year-old daughter abroad in a Maine blizzard ("One for the Road"). Bizarre dripperies, straight out of Tales from the Crypt comics. . . a leprous distillation.