Twelve colorful and intriguingly exotic stories from the British-Guyanese author of Shape-Shifter (a first collection, 1991) and the highly praised novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1998). Though this volume commands an impressive geographical and thematic range, it is neatly (if arbitrarily) unified by its preoccupation with “spirits”: high spirits, alcoholic ones, even such literal presences as the ghost of a Third World dictator that innocently revisits (in “The President’s Exile”) the sites of his earlier triumphs and “humiliations” alike, and in so doing evokes a history of fraud, injustice, and murder. A few stories are little more than anecdotal, but even in “The Fable of the Two Silver Pens,” an O. Henry—like trick ending sets your brain buzzing; “Provenance of a Face” springs a dazzling surprise for the journalist investigating the sources of a celebrated mime’s art; and the wry “English Table Wuk” employs Princess Diana’s funeral as the springboard for a harsh study in cultural contrasts. Homesickness and deeper incompatibilities dominate such complex tales as the resonant title story, in which a well-meaning Englishman and his unillusioned Brazilian Indian wife react very differently to the attractions of Western civilization; the replete “Erzulie,” about a Canadian engineer’s Guyanese wife, a toxic-waste disaster, and a charismatic female mass murderer; and “The Sparkling Ditch,” a cautionary tale Muriel Spark might have dreamed up, wherein a stuffy oil company CEO gets a memorable comeuppance when his wife’s “irrational empathy” with a starving Nigerian boy has life-altering consequences. Best of all is “Mrs. Da Silva’s Carnival,” an agreeably wild tale of a multiethnic street festival honoring “the Rainforests” and drenched in wonderfully dippy dialogue (“Tree-frogs and lizards . . . line up for your photographs”). An irresistible book and a fine introduction, for those who need one, to one of the best new writers on the international scene.
Pub Date: April 30, 1999
ISBN: 1-58234-020-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Warm, generous stories.
A kind and earnest debut collection of connected stories set in blue-collar northeastern Pennsylvania.
MK and Colleen, former classmates at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School, reconnect as middle-aged women, both working retail jobs in a mall that’s just months away from closing its doors. From the outside, they seem to live just on the edge of despair and economic ruin, except both have too much moxie. In "St. Christopher on Pluto," for example, Colleen entangles MK in a plot to ditch Colleen's car by the Susquehanna River for insurance money. While MK lectures Colleen on committing fraud, Colleen wisecracks and tells MK to lighten up. That's the setup of many of McKinley's stories: Bighearted, redheaded Colleen has a scheme (or a volunteer gig), and she wheedles practical MK, often the narrator, into coming along. These slice-of-life stories touch upon social issues on the verge of fracturing already economically stressed, conservative communities: immigration, America's never-ending post–9/11 wars, the HIV epidemic, drug addiction, and the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. In "Complicado," Colleen volunteers to photograph an ESL class graduation, but it turns out the women don't want their pictures taken for fear of becoming the target of a rising tide of jingoism. Once she understands, Colleen yanks the film from her camera, and the party ends with the church organist's offering her accordion to a young Mexican man, "the Latin sounds creat[ing] fusion in a room steeped with polka fests." While we yearn for such happy endings in life, they can seem a bit treacly in fiction. When McKinley resists the lure of “Kumbayah” moments, she delivers emotionally devastating stories about how places with bleak economic futures hurt good, ordinary people—as well as how such people quietly craft lives full of intangible bounty.
Warm, generous stories.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949199-26-0
Page Count: 228
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.
A gathering of short stories by an ascended master of the form.
Best known for mega-bestselling horror yarns, King (Finders Keepers, 2015, etc.) has been writing short stories for a very long time, moving among genres and honing his craft. This gathering of 20 stories, about half previously published and half new, speaks to King’s considerable abilities as a writer of genre fiction who manages to expand and improve the genre as he works; certainly no one has invested ordinary reality and ordinary objects with as much creepiness as King, mostly things that move (cars, kid’s scooters, Ferris wheels). Some stories would not have been out of place in the pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, with allowances for modern references (“Somewhere far off, a helicopter beats at the sky over the Gulf. The DEA looking for drug runners, the Judge supposes”). Pulpy though some stories are, the published pieces have noble pedigrees, having appeared in places such as Granta and The New Yorker. Many inhabit the same literary universe as Raymond Carver, whom King even name-checks in an extraordinarily clever tale of the multiple realities hidden in a simple Kindle device: “What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one—or a dozen, or a thousand—where he quit smoking, lived to be 70, and wrote another half a dozen books?” Like Carver, King often populates his stories with blue-collar people who drink too much, worry about money, and mistrust everything and everyone: “Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.” Best of all, lifting the curtain, King prefaces the stories with notes about how they came about (“This one had to be told, because I knew exactly what kind of language I wanted to use”). Those notes alone make this a must for aspiring writers.
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1167-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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