by Ted Neill ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 27, 2017
Addictive tales that read smoothly while aiming for the gut.
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A collection features a mix of fantasy and coming-of-age stories.
In his introduction, Neill (The Magus, 2016, etc.) explains a legend from his childhood about the Bunny Man, an asylum patient who’d been abandoned in the nearby woods when the institution closed. The episode evolved among teens to describe a crazy hermit who hoarded rabbits and lured kids to their deaths. This imagery draws readers into a series of elegiac tales, half of which star one of two young men, Sidney and Daniel. In stories like “Vespers,” about a fishing trip that forces Daniel to trespass on a supposedly haunted island, and “Quarry,” in which Sidney decides to jump a car into a lake, boyhood is left behind for the harder realities of manhood. “Verities” and “Tyra’s Story,” about the impermanence and unpredictability of love, further explore manhood while addressing religion (specifically Roman Catholicism) and death. Fantasy-tinged entries that offer levity include “Oral Composition,” about a young man whose penchant for biting celebrated artworks makes him famous, and “The Houseguest,” featuring the devil himself as he crashes on a hedge fund manager’s couch. The strangest vignette, “Milk Money,” describes a milk drinking contest in all its gross-out glory. Neill frequently wears his cynicism on his sleeve, as when perfect student Maria Lofton “killed herself with Prozac and a bottle of champagne” while wearing her homecoming dress, leaving a note saying, “Isn’t it obvious.” Yet at the collection’s core are the same themes that make his Elk Riders fantasy novels so rewarding, albeit presented through the greasy lens of young adulthood. The author is deeply fond of outcasts—like David Palmer, war enthusiast—and the sanctity of nature, seen in the passage “Vesper Island...loomed large in my imagination. I could picture the trees, with their cobwebbed branches disturbed by the occasional breeze, which carried the stench of carrion.” Neill’s humor is far left of center, as when God appears in court looking not like “George Burns, Morgan Freeman, or Alanis Morissette” but “a vagrant” who’s been picking through the trash.
Addictive tales that read smoothly while aiming for the gut.Pub Date: July 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5469-5034-9
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Tenebray
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ted Neill ; illustrated by Agata Broncel
BOOK REVIEW
by Ted Neill
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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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by Donna Tartt
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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