A set of clever takes on well-known stories.
In his debut short story collection, Sanders reimagines famous fairy tales in updated, often brutal settings.
In this book’s first tale, “Rumpelstiltskin,” the title character is cast as a scamming junkie. The equivalent of the miller’s daughter from the original tale is a young woman named Jane who attends Catholic school, where she’s the accounting club’s president. Her father isn’t a miller but a beverage distributor named Malachy, and the evil king figure is a mobbed-up strip club owner. Sanders delights in juxtaposing the mundane and the mythic. In one moment we’re told that Malachy, “was eventually able to purchase a small beer distribution business including a reasonably maintained truck and a modest core of likewise reasonably loyal customers”; in the next we’re told: “One day, a woman he vaguely recognized deposited a baby girl in his hardened hands, purportedly his daughter, and left.” The “Three Little Pigs” become three small-town Vermont brothers—triplets fighting a predatory factory owner. The third “pig” is known not for a stone house but a stony demeanor, forged in the Vietnam War. In “Jack and the Beanstalk,” the giant that the young man encounters isn’t a physical giant but rather a larger-than-life Russian gangster. Sanders applies the same types of transpositions to five more tales, including “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Snow White.” His stories are often violent and dark—crimes such as rape, murder, and theft appear throughout the book—and are meant for a solely adult audience. However, this is fitting considering the source material; Sanders reconnects to the violence that appeared in the traditional tales and which was later scrubbed out in a process of sanitization. Indeed, this approach is very intentional; in his preface, Sanders locates his project in the histories of folklore, literature, anthropology, and psychology, and his stated goal is to reimagine “the story as contemporary plots informed by our modern psychologies, while hewing to their original storylines.” The adherence to original storylines can lead to some convoluted twists. However, finding out how Sanders makes these plots work is half the fun.
A set of clever takes on well-known stories.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Deuxmers Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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