Less stylish than The Green Mile (or than Poe), though King remains strong in the short form.
These days, grumbles King (Hearts in Atlantis, 1999), “When you get done, you get done . . . I don’t want to finish up like Harold Robbins.” (Robbins wrote into his 80s despite aphasia from a stroke and kept publishing despite being dead.)
Here, King gathers previously uncollected tales from sources that show his desire to stay fresh by diving into new waters: three pieces have never seen paper—having been electronic, part of a game, or for audio—and four are more polished pieces that ran first in The New Yorker. The title story is from a game called F13 (don’t ask us) and tells of social outcast Dink Earnshaw, who uses symbols and personal words to lead others to suicide. A Mr. Sharpton from Transcorp gets Dink to join his company and write letters that deservedly kill evil people, although Dink must consequently live a constricted life bound by odd rules. (One day, he figures that he’s killed over 200 people, and, hey, not all of them evil.) “Riding the Bullet,” which made publishing history as an e-book and audio book, tells about Alan Parker hitchhiking from the University of Maine to see his hospitalized mother and getting a ride with George Staub, two years dead, whose grave Alan has seen (facing death—this is a “bullet” we all must ride). In “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” Alfie Zimmer, a Gourmet Foods salesman, decides against suicide (for now) and thus saves his large collection of graffiti notes gathered while on the road. In the Poe-esque “In the Deathroom,” an imprisoned New York Times reporter being tortured in some nameless South American version of hell faces death as certain as that faced under the Inquisitors of Toledo in the “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Except that. . . .
Less stylish than The Green Mile (or than Poe), though King remains strong in the short form.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-3515-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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