A humorous, charming collection of tales set in a Midwestern town.
A volume of short stories probes the foibles and fascinations of the residents of a small Indiana town.
What goes for excitement in Sedalia may be different than in other places, but its residents are ready to swarm at the first hint of it. The nosy breakfasters at the local cafe speculate about an unknown car with New York plates that spent the night in a neighbor’s driveway. The idlers at the gas station are curious about how the local undertaker’s behavior has changed since the death of his wife. The sheriff has been getting reports of people buying night-vision goggles at the gun store, and the town doctor may be getting audited by the IRS. Nothing in Sedalia is too small to escape notice. “I mean, naked trucker, running along the bottom of the embankment below the northbound lane,” reports a state police officer at the beginning of one tale. “Nothing but shoes. Obviously trying to avoid being seen. Which is obviously impossible. We get eleven different calls.” Gossip is the fuel of the local discourse, though sometimes the really interesting things are the ones that don’t get said. People who spot bears, for example, can’t tell anyone about them given that the Department of Natural Resources’ official line is that there are no bears in Indiana. Most people born in the town stay in the town. Sedalians tend not to fare as well when they try to make it in the wider world, as with Wanda Sue Blankenship. Wanda moves to New York to be a lawyer and tries to hide her Southern Indiana accent—unsuccessfully. In these 19 stories, the residents of Sedalia are held up for readers’ appraisals, though they can never be judged as thoroughly by an outsider as they are by one another.
Johnson’s prose is easy and wry, perfectly calibrated to the speed of life in his fictional, eponymous municipality. “The skinny young man lay asleep in a filthy sleeping bag just a foot from the edge of the bridge abutment,” begins one tale about an anti-capitalist hitchhiker who has a short but memorable stay in town. “The drop to the dry stone river bed was fifteen feet. His head lay on folded pants, his long brass-colored hair hopelessly tangled. The snore suggested nasal occlusion.” The author has a knack for pinpointing not only the way characters look to the people around them, but also how they appear to themselves. Sedalia’s slight inferiority complex regarding the rest of America—and its snooty neighbor, Elmira, Indiana—is a recurring theme. “Dysfunction in the Mole Challenge Group” is a particular standout, but the strength of these stories is the way that characters weave in and out of them, offering a larger view of the dynamics of the town. Neighbors who appear in one piece are often explored at length in another. As in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and subsequent works of locality-based fiction, Johnson’s book manages to simultaneously poke fun and celebrate small-town American life.
A humorous, charming collection of tales set in a Midwestern town.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 257
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Gothic horror meets the glitz of 21st-century Los Angeles in this surreal and bingeable story.
A 39-year-old woman tries to reclaim her life by becoming a social media producer at a hype house in Los Angeles.
Dayna Lev is sitting in her car, stuck in LA traffic behind a moving truck containing all her possessions, when a friend sends her a link to a Reddit post clearly written by her boyfriend—and that’s how she discovers that he doesn’t really want her to move in. Oh, and she’s currently unemployed. She calls Craig Deckler, a former mentor, who offers her a job at his crumbling family home in the Loz Feliz hills. Dayna gives Craig’s address to the moving van and commits herself to overseeing social media content created by the young adults in what is now a hype house. Olivia Dahl from North Dakota, a newly orphaned 19-year-old, applies for a position at the house, and shows up with her bags and a crushing desire to find out what happened to a former resident—Becca Chambers, a tarot card reader—who mysteriously disappeared months earlier. The other residents include Morgan Bokelberg, makeup aficionado and stylist; Piper Bliss, who was kicked out of her first hype house, and her boyfriend, Sean Knight, who together focus on creating nonspeaking, dance-related couples content; and Jake Cho, who focuses on content designed to make middle-aged women feel cozy and loved. At the pinnacle of the house is Craig, whose family has owned the famous Deckler House for a century. His goal is to raise enough money to renovate the house so it can stay in the family. Author Stein adeptly captures the messiness and contradictions of being human and creating content, portraying the blurred lines between reality and online personas and the unhinged emotional toil that creating such content can take.
Gothic horror meets the glitz of 21st-century Los Angeles in this surreal and bingeable story.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9780593983645
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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