Too brief by far, but with enough sparks to give an idea of the author’s irreverent revelations. Overall, a fresh voice, and...
Shades of the absurd, Orthodox Jewish style, in a nutty little debut collection of 14 stories.
An 18-year-old Lubavitcher yeshiva student wakes up one morning in the form of a “very large goy” and terrorizes the community of bickering rabbis in “The Metamorphosis.” In “God Is a Big Happy Chicken,” newly dead Yankel Morgenstern ascends to heaven to discover that God is—surprise!—Chicken himself, “who gets his feed filled in the morning, and his droppings cleaned in the afternoon and that’s all He really wants to know.” And though Yankel is allowed to return to tell what’s what to his devoted family, still praying to a non-fowl deity, he can’t bring himself to disabuse them of their cherished ideals. In “Bobo the Self-Hating Chimp,” a small male chimpanzee in the Bronx Zoo achieves “total conscious self-awareness” one day when he recognizes that he feels shame—thanks to a “bright red erection”—and has a kind of breakdown that leads him to reject his previous monkey existence as meaningless and embrace suicide. In his theatrically deadpan moments, humor writer Auslander revisits Beckett, most notably, while a fear-and-loathing urban sensibility à la Woody Allen also springs to mind, along with Kafka, in these grim, seemingly silly pieces that possess a direct comic hit. “Holocaust Tips for Kids” is a marvelously twisted catalogue of grisly historical facts mixed with juvenile naïveté and fear: “Anne Frank hid in her attic for over two years. / Maybe I should pack more food.” Many of the stories skewer in some fashion what may be more contentious and solipsistic aspects of Judaism. In the last tale, for example, “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Supremey,” a balding junior accountant, Epstein, creates two slavish golem from the Kabbalah for Dummies only to watch them kill each other over finer points of law.
Too brief by far, but with enough sparks to give an idea of the author’s irreverent revelations. Overall, a fresh voice, and wonderfully fearless.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6456-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
King's newest is a gargantuan summer sausage, at 1144 pages his largest yet, and is made of the same spiceless grindings as ever: banal characters spewing sawdust dialogue as they blunder about his dark butcher shop. The horror this time out is from beyond the universe, a kind of impossible-to-define malevolence that has holed up in the sewers under the New England town of Derry. The It sustains itself by feeding on fear-charged human meat—mainly children. To achieve the maximum saturation of adrenalin in its victims, It presents itself sometimes as an adorable, balloon-bearing clown which then turns into the most horrible personal vision that the victims can fear. The novel's most lovingly drawn settings are the endless, lightless, muck-filled sewage tunnels into which it draws its victims. Can an entire city—like Derry—be haunted? King asks. Say, by some supergigantic, extragalactic, pregnant spider that now lives in the sewers under the waterworks and sends its evil mind up through the bathtub drain, or any drain, for its victims? In 1741, everyone in Derry township just disappeared—no bones, no bodies—and every 27 years since then something catastrophic has happened in Derry. In 1930, 170 children disappeared. The Horror behind the horrors, though, was first discovered some 27 years ago (in 1958, when Derry was in the grip of a murder spree) by a band of seven fear-ridden children known as the Losers, who entered the drains in search of It. And It they found, behind a tiny door like the one into Alice's garden. But what they found was so horrible that they soon began forgetting it. Now, in 1985, these children are a horror novelist, an accountant, a disc jockey, an architect, a dress designer, the owner of a Manhattan limousine service, and the unofficial Derry town historian. During their reunion, the Losers again face the cyclical rebirth of the town's haunting, which again launches them into the drains. This time they meet It's many projections (as an enormous, tentacled, throbbing eyeball, as a kind of pterodactyl, etc.) before going through the small door one last time to meet. . .Mama Spider! The King of the Pulps smiles and shuffles as he punches out his vulgarian allegory, but he too often sounds bored, as if whipping himself on with his favorite Kirin beer for zip.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0451169514
Page Count: 1110
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
BOOK TO SCREEN
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.
A very funny novel about the survivor of a childhood trauma.
At 29, Eleanor Oliphant has built an utterly solitary life that almost works. During the week, she toils in an office—don’t inquire further; in almost eight years no one has—and from Friday to Monday she makes the time go by with pizza and booze. Enlivening this spare existence is a constant inner monologue that is cranky, hilarious, deadpan, and irresistible. Eleanor Oliphant has something to say about everything. Riding the train, she comments on the automated announcements: “I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon.” Eleanor herself might as well be from Ulan Bator—she’s never had a manicure or a haircut, worn high heels, had anyone visit her apartment, or even had a friend. After a mysterious event in her childhood that left half her face badly scarred, she was raised in foster care, spent her college years in an abusive relationship, and is now, as the title states, perfectly fine. Her extreme social awkwardness has made her the butt of nasty jokes among her colleagues, which don’t seem to bother her much, though one notices she is stockpiling painkillers and becoming increasingly obsessed with an unrealistic crush on a local musician. Eleanor’s life begins to change when Raymond, a goofy guy from the IT department, takes her for a potential friend, not a freak of nature. As if he were luring a feral animal from its hiding place with a bit of cheese, he gradually brings Eleanor out of her shell. Then it turns out that shell was serving a purpose.
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2068-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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