Eschewing most of the usual clichés of southern writers—but not self-consciously trying to avoid them either—Blue Moon Café...
The satisfying result of a bunch of southern writers deciding: “Hey! Let’s put out an anthology!”
It started at the annual meeting of Southern Writers Reading in Fairhope, Alabama, when the group’s erstwhile leader, an editor and bookstore owner named Sonny Brewer, announced to the group that he thought it would be a cool idea if they published a chapbook. Thirty writers then contributed pieces, mostly fiction, just about all very short, and generally quite good. Like any good southern anthology, it starts off with a Civil War story—“Final Spring,” by Marlin Barton—that tells it straight and sad. A jump into the present day comes with C. Terry Cline Jr.’s hilarious, Barthleme-esque “S. Trident,” which consists of an exchange of letters between a man who buys an old Army base at auction (only to discover it’s a not-entirely-decommissioned missile silo) and the stunningly blasé officer who answers his questions about the utilities and strange leaks. There are some bigger names scattered throughout this smorgasbord, like W.E.B. Griffin and Pat Conroy, but their pieces are pretty slim and feel tossed-off. Suzanne Hudson’s “The Fall of the Nixon Administration” uses Watergate as a backdrop for her comic tale of a prudish daughter caught between her wanton mother, her closeted husband, and the beautiful and repulsive rampant id figure that’s her mother’s younger boyfriend. The Civil War shows up yet again, in “Killing Stonewall Jackson” by Michael Knight, an almost unbelievably horrid and gothic slice of the lives of some soldiers who go by the monikers Ghost Story and Gellar the Jew; it’s funny and haunting simultaneously. With the exception of some pieces that feel just too painfully thin, this is an uncommonly even and rewarding collection.
Eschewing most of the usual clichés of southern writers—but not self-consciously trying to avoid them either—Blue Moon Café is a decidedly tasty buffet.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2002
ISBN: 1-931561-09-5
Page Count: 385
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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