A multigenre sampler of brisk, inoffensive tales of a kind that may inspire nostalgia.
Delgrosso’s third collection of short-short stories offers slice-of-life vignettes and more fantastical SF and paranormal yarns.
“Time Skip” is one of the lengthier tales in the collection, although it’s not long at all; in it, a family-man narrator vanishes for two years, but for him, no time has passed at all. Hypnosis reveals that it’s the doing of bizarre-looking aliens: “something between an octopus and a turtle, a dense, shell-like cover over something softer that was held up by a bunch of tentacles rather than legs.” What their actions might mean for humanity’s future is an unanswered question. In “Cured,” a narrator with a rare blood type is the subject of a future, experimental plague treatment from helpful extraterrestrials with unforeseen side effects. In “Treestones,” a virtuous young pioneer-settler couple in the 1880s do a good turn to a Kiowa shaman, who rewards them with practically eternal life. However, the couple must deal with the fallout of remaining conspicuously unchanged. The more earthbound stories include “The Bread Problem,” in which a young Italian American proudly takes charge of the family bread-baking business but resorts to extreme measures when faced with a mob shakedown. A similar gangland background appears in “Funny You Should Ask,” in which a former wise guy thinks, mistakenly, that he’s gotten out of the syndicate without repercussions. The narrator of “From Head to Toe,” meanwhile, escapes dire peril on a wilderness hike but is exhilarated, not traumatized, by the experience. “Making a Difference” follows the routine of a military sniper who’s recruited for the war on drugs.
Not all the tales feature such deadly dramatics; the protagonist of “Wound Up,” for instance, gains self-confidence by being thrust into the unplanned role of opening for a rock band who’s late in setting up. The author calls his oeuvre “books to read before bed for grownups” though not in the bawdy sense, but rather in the notion of uncomplicated, nongraphic, plainspoken narratives that wrap up in a minimum of pages. A few of the pieces, such as “Test Day” and “Red Hot,” intriguingly have the mien of the story genre known as the conte cruel, in which nasty conclusions await main characters who don’t really seem to deserve such terrible fates. However, most of these stories in this collection don’t seem to aspire to O. Henry-style head-spinning twists; indeed, many of them bring down the curtain as early as possible, at the point at which the reader realizes what the plot is. In the stories in the horror/SF/fantasy vein, Delgrosso most recalls an unsung and prolific short-story master of yesteryear: William Sambrot, who was anthologized only once, in 1963’s Island of Fear and Other Science Fiction Stories, but is worth seeking out. Other works feel like flash fiction—workshop-developed, bite-sized pieces—and they generally come across as the types of tale that used to fill up fiction pages when popular family magazines like The Saturday Evening Post were newsstand mainstays.
A multigenre sampler of brisk, inoffensive tales of a kind that may inspire nostalgia.Pub Date: May 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781327004469
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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