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THE VENERATION OF MONSTERS

Name: THE VENERATION OF MONSTERS
Author: Suzanne Burns
ISBN: 978-1-941088-76-0

by Suzanne Burns ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2017

Burns is an unmissable heir to writers of the peculiar, from Shirley Jackson to Roald Dahl.

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A parade of eccentric women retreat into fantasy as they attempt to cure their loneliness.

There's a moment in this collection’s second story, “Selfie,” that tells readers much of what they need to know about the book. Violet is in her early 30s and runs a blog for goths. She decides, in an effort to up her readership, to live blog her attempts to summon a vampire lover from the local graveyard. And it works: while she's doing gravestone rubbings in the middle of the night, her undead boyfriend-to-be flits over and compliments her technique. Violet replies, “Thank you…I played with Fashion Plates as a child.” Like so many of the antiheroines Burns (Love Songs for Las Vegas, 2014, etc.) has created, Violet is an oddball, living largely inside her own imagination but desperate for approval, attention, and love. Violet's efforts to gain this love—like those of the other protagonists here—make for writing that is at once darkly funny and tenderly empathetic. In “Unwound,” Lara is inspired by a horror story about a woman whose head will fall off if her neck ribbon is removed, until she carries her playacting too far. In “Best of Show,” the wife of the world’s smallest man contemplates an affair. And in the book’s longest story, “The Unfortunate Act of Falling,” Joan, an upper-middle-class housewife, has a surprising reaction to the death of a local boy and becomes obsessed with its effect on her suburban town. Although many of Burns’ stories have similar arcs, there is such delight in the oddity of the details and the wit and precision of the writing that they each retain their sharpness.

Burns is an unmissable heir to writers of the peculiar, from Shirley Jackson to Roald Dahl.

Pub Date: July 11, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-941088-76-0

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Dzanc

Review Posted Online: April 24, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET
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by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.