Dark, brooding fiction from a master of the form. And take our word for it: don’t go up to the attic, even if it is just a...
“Did I say he was dead? What I said was, he is…gone.” Welcome to an odd world in which the dead never quite go away, and the living are—well, not quite there.
Readers of horror know, even if characters in movies and books do not, that it’s never a good idea to go up to the attic, even when it’s euphemized as “the upstairs junk room.” Bad things happen in such dark interior spaces, as the characters in Straub’s long opening story learn; in a narrative marked by a tenuous hold on time and an even more tenuous one on reality, an unfortunate young man finds that hypnosis is maybe not such a good idea after all, leading to an event that, the protagonist tells us, “virtually destroyed my family.” And not just virtually. Straub (In the Night Room, 2004, etc.), who, this collection ably reveals, has affinities with both Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, likes nothing more than a good, taut, psychologically charged yarn that raises more questions than it answers: “I thought of myself as a work of art,” a denizen of one fairy tale–like story remarks. “I caused responses without being responsible for them.” In a Straub-ian world, proper responses include puzzlement, nervousness, and fear, to say nothing of indulging in coprophiliac moments that are going to ruin some unfortunate housekeeper’s day. Denial is also allowed; as another of Straub’s characters yelps, bewildered at the thought that Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener” should be esteemed enough to be taught in school, “I never went to any college, but I do know that nothing means what it says, not on this planet.” That’s exactly right, one reason not to trust Straub’s narrators, whose worlds include an unhealthy amount of free-floating anger and not a little craziness—though if anger and craziness can bring a taxi-flattened cat back to life, then so much the better.
Dark, brooding fiction from a master of the form. And take our word for it: don’t go up to the attic, even if it is just a junk room.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54105-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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An unconventional protagonist and vivid style are the distinguishing features of this nevertheless uneven second collection of 11 interrelated stories from Houston (Cowboys Are My Weakness, 1992). The central character and narrator here is thirtysomething Lucy O’Rourke, a landscape photographer with a penchant for physically challenging adventure (white-water canoeing, hanging with “glider pilots”) and a history of romantic indecision and folly (“I always pick the wrong man . . . I’m kind of famous for it”). For example, her relationship with one promising male (Josh) is defined by finding who is the superior “river runner.” Ergo: Lucy’s encounters with men occur in such contexts as a storm off the coast of Bimini or a narrow escape, on an Ecuador river, from a vicious “grand cayman.” Much of this is presented with impressive vigor—Houston is a fine descriptive writer and has a keen ear for crisp, give-and-take dialogue—and Lucy’s present confusions are efficiently interwoven with complex memories of her uneasy detente with her “difficult” parents (the title story, about their indulgent love for a pet cat, is a beauty).Still, the volume feels undeveloped—as if Houston were only hastily jotting down random observations about Lucy’s tumultuous life and loves. The impression of uncertainty is deepened by a curious strain of faux-mysticism that threads weirdly through these stories: sonorous advice, for instance, offered by a Pakistani cabdriver in Manhattan; a chance meeting, at a California airport, with Carlos Castaneda (which “tells” Lucy she must accept the Colorado ranch left her by her grandmother’s will); and, in a tenuous “Epilogue,” her inexplicable bonding with an agelessly wise (and utterly unbelievable) seven-year-old girl. There are gorgeous, arresting flashes of insight, color, and drama aplenty, but there isn’t a book here. Houston remains a gifted writer who needs a subject.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-02749-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
Superb rawhide shoot-’em-ups from Leonard’s early years that not only stand tall beside his bestselling crime fiction (Out of Sight, 1996, etc.) but might even revive the moribund western literary genre. Leonard’s first nine published novels were westerns, one of which became the creaky Paul Newman’s 1967 film Hombre. While supporting himself as an advertising copywriter, Leonard developed his steely-eyed, resourceful but romantically compassionate American heroes, his feisty females, the villainous authority figures, menacing oddballs, and fast-talking nincompoops that he later transferred so successfully to the contemporary urban environments of Detroit, Miami, New Orleans, and Hollywood. Though Leonard’s rugged western scouts talk the talk and appreciate the difference between a Sharps and Winchester rifle, there is a timeless excitement in these spare, tauntingly wrought scenes of macho confrontation against a harsh, lawless landscape that brings out the best and worst in everyone. Like the stories of Raymond Chandler, these 19 episodic tales, played out among the dusty, Apache-haunted canyons between the aptly named towns of Inspiration and Contention, are highly polished set pieces, replete with the winking humor and masculine terror that lack only the escalating sense of violence and prolonged tension of the longer books. A stage robbery goes awry when a renegade Mescalero decides to test his manhood (“Trouble at Rindo’s Station”); unbearable guilt makes Bob Valdez go from good guy to bad when he’s forced to kill an innocent man (“Only Good Ones”); Amelia Darck, wife of a US Cavalry colonel, stares down an Apache bandit (“The Colonel’s Lady”); and, in a long story that prefigures the heart-stopping climaxes of Leonard’s crime novels, Pat Brennan, a luckless, unarmed cowboy, valiantly rescues a woman abandoned by her craven husband from a trio of homicidal kidnappers. A list of publishing credits, or an introduction indicating what magazines or editors nurtured the master’s career, might have helped future biographers. Still, these lean and stirring action stories are among the best of Leonard’s long career.
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32386-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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