Clever, high-concept stories that sometimes lack in the telling.
An assortment of speculative short stories filled with ghosts, time leaps, and alternate realities.
Butner has a knack for a quirky, eye-catching premise. “Holderhaven” turns on the discovery of a hidden staircase in a historic manor. “Horses Blow Up Dog City” imagines a dystopian future in which a puppeteer becomes a pop-culture celebrity. In “Give Up,” a man attempts to summit Mount Everest via a virtual reality, while the narrator of “Delta Function” finds himself witnessing the New Wave band he played in back in college. The stories’ arch tone, offbeat scenarios, and folkloric elements bear a resemblance to George Saunders' and Carmen Maria Machado's work, though Butner has his own thematic obsessions. Earnest but frustrated struggles to recover the past is a big one, not just in time-travel yarns like “Delta Function,” but “The Master Key,” in which two friends return to their high school, or the opening “Adventure,” in which a reunion of two friends becomes oddly upended by the appearance of a man in a jester suit. In his best stories, Butner effectively merges the strange setups with a bracing mix of humor and dread. “The Ornithopter,” for instance, takes place in an office whose staff has been rapidly whittled down to a handful of people, one of whom is a hardcore Star Trek geek. (“The metaphor they’re working inside of might be the Nostromo, the spaceship from Alien, not the USS Enterprise,” the hero notes.) And “Give Up” conjures the horrifying sense that a glitchy fake Everest might be as challenging as the real thing. But too often, these stories don’t rise to their promise, occluded with plot or dense prose that smothers the wit and insight Butner strives to bring to them.
Clever, high-concept stories that sometimes lack in the telling.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61873-194-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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