An uneven but always fun assemblage of pulpy tales.
An omnibus collection of Southern-fried weird fiction erects a mausoleum for a state’s strangest town.
Welcome to Redgunk, Mississippi, where the kudzu creeps, the aliens abduct, and curious visitors can see a real-life mummy behind the Corner Liquor Store and Gas for just 50 cents. It’s a place of mermaids, dragons, and 100-foot-tall giants. It’s also home to individuals with drug addictions, social workers, and good ol’ boys—just like any town in Mississippi. Redgunk provides the setting for these 38 stories, which represent three decades of Eakin’s distinctive brand of larger-than-life yarn spinning. In “Lawnmower Moe,” a man who kicks the bucket while trimming his grass returns from the grave to haunt his wife and children. In “Homesickness,” an abductee and his identical replicant are both set loose in town, their incurable pining for home rendering them useless as alien test subjects. In the H.P. Lovecraft–ian “Shadow Out of Redgunk,” a mad scientist explains his part in the origin of an 8-foot monster who stalks the local kudzu. In “Unicorn Stew,” the quest for the eponymous creature leads to one of the area’s grisliest murders. Combining previously published, uncollected, and never published tales, the author presents for the first time the complete literature of a town in which nothing ever stays dead—and most things don’t stay completely alive either. Eakin’s prose is equal parts Lovecraft and Harry Crews, reveling in mashups of the occult with good, old-fashioned, small-town scandals: “His Mama was that beautiful mad woman reported by the Felpham Gazette and several superstitious frog-giggers to be wandering and writhing naked and shiny and moist in the greenbrier and wild grape of the woods behind Redgunk Cemetery.” The stories alternately incorporate elements of fantasy, horror, and SF, but a consistent sense of gallows humor unites the book from the first tale to the last. They aren’t all home runs, and the author’s digressive maximalism could often be improved by a strong editor’s pen. But the real joy of the collection is in watching this world accumulate from story to story. By that metric, its nearly 600 pages don’t seem all that long.
An uneven but always fun assemblage of pulpy tales.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781590214787
Page Count: 593
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.
Ng selects 20 stories that illustrate why we might still read fiction in a time of disinformation and lies.
As the trials and tribulations of the 21st century have unfolded, the Best American Short Stories anthology has become a particular way of taking the temperature of each passing year. As Ng writes in her introduction to the latest group, “Short stories in particular can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values—then allowing us to bring ourselves into alignment with what we believe. In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” Many of them are also fun to read, a quality appreciated more than ever by depressed and overwhelmed readers. The stories are ordered alphabetically, a structure maintained in the following selection, which is unfortunately limited by space. “Take Me to Kirkland,” by Sarah Anderson, is very funny, a little weird, and certainly one of Costco’s finest hours. “What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder is a cinematic mini-thriller about a trans kid visiting his hometown, terrified of being “clocked” by the people he grew up with after he saves a local from drowning. “Time of the Preacher,” by Bret Anthony Johnston, is one of several pandemic stories—in it, a snake, which may or may not be under the refrigerator, inspires a quarantine-breaking cry for help from a fence-builder’s ex-wife. Another story of that time, “Yellow Tulips,” by Nathan Curtis Roberts, also combines endearing, funny first-person narration with a more serious theme. A Mormon man in an uptight Utah suburb has to manage his developmentally disabled adult son through the complexities of quarantine. One day, he discovers that his son has “gotten into the provisions Mormons are all but commanded to keep, eating Nutella and Marshmallow Fluff from their jars.…Brig, we put these things aside for the apocalypse,’” the father says, while his son “grinned gleefully, sugary goo smeared across his lips and fingers. ‘It’s an apocalypse now!’”
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063399808
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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