A brash, gory, and often fantastical volume of tales that will likely polarize readers.
A short fiction collection tells stories of gangsters, dead writers, zombies, and other malcontents.
A famously short-tempered mobster hoping to finish his college degree goes to collect a debt he’s owed, only to realize that his bookie has been scamming his boss. An aspiring poet gets some encouragement from the ghost of Dylan Thomas in a park, who explains to him how whiskey was the key to his success. Fifty years after he and his grandfather fired a coffee can containing one of his teeth at the moon, an Iowa farmer gets a surprise in the form of a familiar-looking meteor. The children of a dead toy manufacturer squabble over his estate, though they find that the gifts he left them might not be as valuable as they thought. In this collection of 13 tales, O’Keefe (Shot to Pieces, 2016) offers contemporary fables full of outlandish premises and ironic twists. Several of the stories are violent cautionary tales, like “Buried Hatchet,” which follows an overly zealous Brooklyn hit man whose signature method of killing comes back to haunt him: “He used it until he thought he had elevated it to an art form. But his growing fascination led to over-use. Over-use leads to mistakes. The rising blood-lust prevented Gustav from appreciating as much.” At their best—such as “Sal’s Way,” about a stubborn and overconfident electrician—the stories have the feel of well-told street jokes. Some are quite imaginative, like “The Siwanoy Take Back The Bronx,” in which a Native American curse causes the denizens of that borough (including the New York Yankees) to go on a murderous rampage. But the author’s sense of humor is highly gruesome, and sometimes the punishment his characters receive feels incommensurate for their mistakes. (In one work, O’Keefe has his own daughter murdered in an unmarked college bathroom to punctuate an extended discussion of the Mandela Effect.) While the enjoyment of these tales will mostly come down to readers’ tastes, the fairly formulaic structure of the stories makes the reading experience rather monotonous after a while.
A brash, gory, and often fantastical volume of tales that will likely polarize readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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