Paisley’s tales shine when they take a sensitive approach to psychological horror, but readers may find that some scenes...
Age-old acts of violence are monstrously reimagined in a transgressive set of stories that aims to haunt its readers.
Paisley’s collection is a short, sharp shock, coming in at just under 200 pages in length. It’s carved into three sections, each containing three stories, followed by one standalone novella. The sections—“Divine,” “In,” and “Essence”—have a central theme, examined in wicked ways. The prologue, “Abandon All Ye Who Enter,” primes the reader for the horrors ahead, which feature worlds that live in the “sensorium” and “imaginarium.” The former is “contemptuous of time,” and the physical and emotional pain that the characters endure is immediate and ongoing—and reactivated once read. The latter “entangles time.” These warnings act as a theme for the collection: “Suffering transmutes to ecstasy.” The first section, “Divine,” examines the paths and outcomes of familial violence, best exemplified by “The Great Event,” which acts as a twisted creation story, drawing from ancient Greek mythology into a dubiously spiritual present. “In” examines the relationship between the living and the dead and features a standout story, “The Metaphor of the Lakes,” in which a ghostly Gracie diarizes her small world with creativity and heart toward a devastating conclusion. Finally, “Essence” examines the overlap of violence and pleasure and a longing for freedom. “Mary Alice in the Mirror” is a highlight, with one of the collection’s arguably brighter endings, telling a tale of two children trying to liberate a woman trapped behind glass. The final novella, “The Life of Cherry,” charts mythic maternal violence in an attempt to converge various themes that previous stories raise.
Over the course of this collection, Paisley’s heightened, lyrical prose and occult-ish imagery strengthen the tales’ self-contained worlds; they are especially successful in works that have a strong emotional core. “In” contains the strongest stories in the book, innovatively exploring the limitations between the living and the dead. One of its tales, “Nancy & Her Man,” in which a woman visits a long-deceased companion to treat him to an annual day out, will linger with readers long after it’s over. “Fever Visions” is an equally haunting work in which a child experiences her mother’s sickness in Blakean detail: “I saw a great many human bodies that were misformed and bent into hideous…shapes, and they were operating strange, ancient-looking machines.” The aforementioned “The Metaphor of the Lakes” employs notably vivid prose as its protagonist discovers her fate: “As soon as my feet touched beyond the threshold, I found myself, along with my brother, in a vast wintry field, its snowy expanses so blindingly white that they were actually a kind of blue.” However, although several of the stories here strive to balance the elevated supernatural ideas introduced in the prologue, they also get bogged down by their accounts of the baser impulses of humanity, which the author paints in broad, violent strokes that may turn the stomachs of even the most seasoned readers of the horror genre.
Paisley’s tales shine when they take a sensitive approach to psychological horror, but readers may find that some scenes feel excessive.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781952600555
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Whiskey Tit
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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