A rich, beautiful, and utterly terrifying book.
This collection of horror stories about men at their lowest—enraged, depressed, violent—offers an unsettling glimpse into the seething underworld of toxic masculinity.
Meijer's (Northwood, 2018, etc.) firecracker debut collection, Heartbreaker, examined the wild, strange interior lives of girls and women. In this book, she strikes out into new territory, unearthing the anger and melancholy of male protagonists who revel in their own cruelty, power, and loneliness. Like Samantha Hunt and Carmen Maria Machado, Meijer wields strangeness to amplify the emotional realities of her narrators—and the consequences of their deranged, inhumane, and violent impulses. Her characters operate in worlds like our own, lusting after their customers at a local pizza shop or denying feelings they have for other men. But they are also vengeful ghosts of stillborn baby boys, rags used to murder wives, and dogs who steal the lace underthings of teenage girls. In "Pool," a teacher falls for the student lifeguard who saves his life only to reject the boy's affections. The detective in "Evidence" tracks a female serial killer but ultimately unearths his desire to become one of her victims. Other stories, like "Francis" and "Good Girls," literalize metaphors about the animalistic urges of men. But Meijer saves the scariest of all for "Viral," in which her lone female protagonist tapes and distributes a video of her former friend masturbating as an act of humiliation and revenge. "I'm in the car waiting for my boyfriend to kill her," the story opens. "She is pretty and very smart and she didn't want to go out with him and sometimes it's as simple as that. She screwed up." While at times her narrators can seem almost excessively cruel, Meijer's stories are an indictment of the indignities women—and other men—face every day as they dodge or appease the dangerous impulses and appetites of misogyny.
A rich, beautiful, and utterly terrifying book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-24623-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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