A familiar and ultimately disappointing selection. Short-story aficionados know by now to turn to the Pushcart anthologies...
This year’s anthology of 20 stories could almost be called The Best of The New Yorker, since 40 percent of guest editor Moore’s choices appeared there first.
Moore calls the collection “a kind of group portrait of how humanity is currently faring,” and one gets the impression that it’s faring poorly in rather consistent ways, if the number of characters here who are down-in-the-dumps guys drinking too much is any indication. Sherman Alexie’s homeless Spokane Indian in “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” is an alcoholic with a “busted stomach.” T. Coraghessan Boyle’s southern California transplant in “Tooth and Claw” is most comfortable in a bar filled with old men drinking themselves into oblivion, like his father. And Stuart Dybek’s Chicago hit man in “Breasts” wakes up with a hangover on the Sunday he’s supposed to “do a job.” Then there’s John, in Paula Fox’s “Grace,” a lonely accountant whose dog, Grace, gives him some way of connecting with others until she develops heartworm, resulting in his slugging down four whiskeys and deciding to order a steak. Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Screenwriter,” who gets a day pass from the psych ward, visits a former patient he calls the ballerina, gets drunk, takes some of her meds, and watches her burn her nipples with cigarettes and pour hot wax on her thigh. John Updike’s David Kern, who uses his 50th high-school reunion to remember his first real kiss, is a quiet relief from all this, as are Alice Munro’s masterful “Runaway” and the fetching homage to Munro, Trudy Lewis’s “Limestone Diner.” Mary Yukari Waters and John Edgar Wideman also bring welcome spaciousness, with stories about, respectively, a Japanese primate specialist adjusting to a heart condition and memories of the war years, and a man whose search for the imprisoned son of a deceased friend opens him back to life.
A familiar and ultimately disappointing selection. Short-story aficionados know by now to turn to the Pushcart anthologies for new voices.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-19734-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Book #1 (of four) of King's celebrated megabucks publishing contract—and it's King at his effusive near-best, with a long, ultra-violent, suspenseful story of a best-selling writer whose pseudonym comes to life and goes on a murderous rampage. As in Misery, King again fantasizes from his own writerly experience, creating as his hero Maine author Thad Beaumont—who, in addition to literary novels under his own name, has written four grisly best-sellers under the pen name of George Stark. Unlike King's own Richard Bachman pseudonym, though—to whom King claims "indebtedness" here, and who was laid to rest after exposure by a resourceful reporter—Stark takes on malignant flesh after Thad (staving off threatened exposure) kills him off by going public in People magazine. Rising from his mock grave pictured in the People spread, Stark beats to death a local Maine man—and draws the ire of subsidiary hero Sheriff Alan Pang-born. When Stark's fingerprints turn out to match Thad's, the writer becomes the law-man's prime suspect—until Stark's graphically detailed blood-riot in Manhattan, where he kills Thad's literary agent and everyone associated with his "death," convinces Pang-born that Thad is innocent. King enriches this mayhem with his usual psychological soundings (are the now telepathically linked Stark and Thad truly two halves of one whole?) and occult symbolism (in an effective borrowing from The Birds, millions of sparrows, "psychopomps," herald Stark's moves). But the strong accent here is on violent action, with matters reaching a ripping climax as Stark kidnaps Thad's family to force Thad to help him write one last novel—the writing of which will allow the crazed Stark, now decaying, to suck up Thad's life force. A potent, engrossing blend of occult and slasher horror, not as fully riveting or grandly ironic as Misery, but without the pomposities of much other recent King—It; The Tommy-knockers—and certainly slick and scary enough to make it the book to beat on the fall lists.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1989
ISBN: 0451167317
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1989
Stomach-churning horror that takes a bit too much joy in its diabolic machinations.
A writers’ retreat turns out to be more hellish than its participants would have imagined.
The willing participants all answered an ad for a three-month retreat that would allow them to cut off all contact with the outside world (they all leave in a bus before dawn, telling no one), only to find themselves locked in an old theater with no way out and a limited supply of food. Their sort-of host for the retreat, Mr. Whittier, wants them to use their isolation to create some sort of masterpiece, invoking the Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron, Shelley, among others, produced their classics of gothic horror. It’s quickly obvious, however, that we’re far from the land of Shelley with this band of losers, who seem more interested in heightening their own suffering in order to have a better sell for the movie or memoir rights they will assuredly be offered once rescued. Palahniuk (Diary, 2003, etc.) ensures that we have little sympathy for the characters—known for the most part by the sarcastic noms de plume they give each other, like Comrade Snarky, Miss Sneezy and Chef Assassin—by showing how they continually sabotage themselves. The characters’ back-stories, which make up the bulk of the novel, also show them to be a uniformly selfish, grubby and, more often than not, murderous lot, so when the bloodletting starts, few tears will be shed. As usual, Palahniuk drops us right into a nasty, vile core of base desire where all good deeds are punished and nobody escapes unscathed (let’s just say that cannibalism pops up about a third of the way in, and things get worse from there on). And while a number of the stories here are ingenious, in a devilish sort of way, the constant barrage of wicked sadism soon palls.
Stomach-churning horror that takes a bit too much joy in its diabolic machinations.Pub Date: May 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50948-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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