Perhaps this is the way of things with fiction anthologies: lots of skill and nothing to rock the boat. It doesn’t...
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
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1977
ISBN: 0385129912
Page Count: 367
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1977
BOOK TO SCREEN
Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot” to Be Epix Show
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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