A page-turning horror story with a few legitimate shocks and plenty of angst.
Set against the backdrop of the modern American South, Reese’s supernatural coming-of-age tale brims with horror and revenge.
It’s Lydia Cantrell’s 10th birthday, and her wealthy family has thrown a party for the kids of Sherman’s March, Ga. While the children are having a good time, Lydia’s father, Frank, is held up on his way to the event by a mysterious young girl to whom he offers a ride. After the party, with indefinable evil lurking inside him, Frank rapes his daughter. The novel then jumps forward two years to the summer before Lydia’s freshman year of high school. Lydia, now shy and academic, dons a teenage goth style, and her father still sexually abuses her with regularity. Her mother drugs herself to escape the hellish existence that life has become for the Cantrells. Though mocked by her peers and tormented by her family, Lydia has one bright spot in life—Michael, with whom she has a blossoming though tentative romance. However, as the young heroine turns to self-harm and Marilyn Manson as a means of escape, she makes a startling discovery: someone, or something, has given her the ability to control fire. Diary entries from the 19th century, written by one of Lydia’s relatives, are spliced into the text in a relatively weak effort to impart some sense of Southern history to the work. These sections, mostly concerned with the rage of a forgotten lover in the antebellum South, mirror Lydia’s darker story and provide the reader with a historical precedent of the family’s pyrokinetic ability. Occasionally, distracting lines—“That was the Lydia he loved, not Crabzilla the PMS Princess”—crop up to provide neither comic relief nor add any realism to the character’s mentalities; the result causes the short narrative to stumble as it trots along to a familiar-feeling finale. But there are some admirable qualities: For all its faults, the horror story will have readers eagerly turning pages to see just how Lydia’s revenge will play out. The truly shocking moments come early in the text, though, and a tendency to stray too far from the already short narrative may bother readers who feel that the extremely weighty issues raised aren’t given enough care or concern from an emotional or psychological standpoint.
A page-turning horror story with a few legitimate shocks and plenty of angst.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.
A slim volume of largely gay-themed writings with pessimistic overtones.
Poe (Simple Simon, 2013, etc.) divides this collection of six short stories and 34 poems into five sections: “Art,” “Death,” “Relationship,” “Being,” and “Reflection.” Significantly, a figurative death at the age of 7 appears in two different poems, in which the author uses the phrase “a pretended life” to refer to the idea of hiding one’s true nature and performing socially enforced gender roles. This is a well-worn trope, but it will be powerful and resonant for many who have struggled with a stigmatized identity. In a similar vein, “Imaginary Tom” presents the remnants of a faded relationship: “Now we are imaginary friends, different in each other’s thoughts, / I the burden you seek to discard, / you the lover I created from the mist of longing.” Once in a while, short story passages practically leap off of the page, such as this evocative description of a seedy establishment in Lincoln, Nebraska: “It was a dimly lit bar that smelled of rodent piss, with barstools that danced on uneven legs and made the patrons wonder if they were drunker than they thought.” In “Valéry’s Ride,” Poe examines the familial duties that often fall to unmarried and childless people, keeping them from forming meaningful bonds with others. In this story, after the double whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hits Louisiana, Valéry’s extended family needs him more than ever; readers will likely root for the gay protagonist as he makes the difficult decision to strike out on his own. Not all of Poe’s main characters are gay; the heterosexual title character in “Mrs. Calumet’s Workspace,” for instance, pursues employment in order to escape the confines of her home and a passionless marriage. Working as a bookkeeper, she attempts to carve out a space for herself, symbolized by changes in her work area. Still, this story echoes the recurring theme of lives unlived due to forces often beyond one’s control.
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5168-3693-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.
A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.
In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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