A short story collection that’s by turns wry, heartwarming, and richly dramatic.
Schulz’s debut fiction anthology contains 26 short stories of varying formats and lengths, each anchored on the common framework of a small, Western farming community called Havelock, an unpretentious place far from the big cities. Between stories, Schulz intersperses tongue-in-cheek snippets from the town’s various announcements and advertisements, like one for the Havelock Mortuary: “We are the only mortuary in town. So it’s either us or behind the barn.” The stories range widely in both tone and scope; some are very short, little more than bits of dialogue with stage directions, while others, although usually still quite short, are far more complex and ambitious, such as the collection’s most gripping piece, “Terror in the Heartland,” which opens with a trio of strangers driving onto the isolated farm of an old couple who’s been there 20 years. The visitors trigger the husband’s suspicions, and when the men return armed and obviously intent on murder, they get the story’s well-executed surprise: The seemingly mild-mannered old farmer is a retired special agent more than capable of defending himself and his wife. “The AK-47 is a dependable and an easy weapon to use,” he muses. “I had many friends who were killed with this weapon.” Equally detailed but entirely different in tone is “Gone Fishing,” in which a workaholic bank employee in North Dakota goes on a road trip to go fishing, though he suddenly finds himself back in the 1950s, able to visit his parents’ farm as a young man and get a second chance at living his life. This note of nostalgia runs through most of the stories—a strong evocation of simpler times full of common sense and daily kindness. Lost and lonely people in dire straits (“Mary started the winter without any supplies or coal, and a dead husband”) are saved again and again by the simple kindness of others; in one bleak story, hope is brought by none other than Santa Claus.
A touching, effective collection that will keep its smiling readers guessing.
Pub Date: May 14, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 125
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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