A mixed bag with a few standouts.
Ten stories of transformation—both real and magical.
On the one hand, transmutation means transformation; on the other, it may suggest change of a specific sort—produced by alchemy or even radioactive decay. The stories in DiFrancesco’s book flirt with both, moving between realistic situations and gothic plots to show us characters in the midst of becoming their real selves, changing into something new, or even being altered. In “Inside my Saffron Cave,” Junie is an angry trans teenager who is waiting to escape her mother and her mother’s abusive boyfriend so she can transition and become who she wants to be. In “The Ledger of the Deep,” a more hopeful piece, Sawyer’s dad embraces his son’s new identity as a trans man by changing the name of their boat from Sara to Sawyer. Both stories feel a little simple—the boyfriend too cruel, the father too quick to understand. Instead, DiFrancesco’s gothic tales, which are wonderfully creepy, are the real winners here. In “A Little Procedure,” based on Rosemary Kennedy’s life, Lily receives a lobotomy when her promiscuity threatens her family’s reputation. But unlike Kennedy, who was disabled by the operation, Lily’s altered intellect doesn’t stop her from getting revenge. A hired girl goes missing in “Hinkypunk” after she gets too close to her boss’s granddaughter. That night, mysterious lights begin appearing in the marsh that the grandmother dismisses as nothing more than marsh gas. The mother in “The Chuck Berry Tape Massacre” loses her grasp on reality and drags her young daughters into her madness until the girls are forever damaged. Another narrative strand about a musician finding a tape made by the oldest daughter and its impact on his career feels like a distraction from the real pathos of the family’s story.
A mixed bag with a few standouts.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64421-066-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.
Pitlor ushers in her final installment as series editor of this long-running staple showcasing the year in short fiction.
Of all the kids at the literary lunch table, the anthology might have it the hardest. Wearing plaid with stripes, unpacking the random items in its lunch box—it’s hard for a cohesive personality to shine through, unlike those cool-kid single-author collections. But if readers are prepared for eclecticism—and since Best American Short Stories was established in 1915, we must be—these 20 stories have something for everyone. Guest edited by Groff, a seven-time Best American author, the collection includes some nods to short story royalty: Jhumpa Lahiri, Lori Ostlund, the late Laurie Colwin, and Jim Shepard are all represented. But as both Pitlor and Groff discuss in their introductions, Groff sent back Pitlor’s initial batch of stories asking for something “rawer, meaner, spikier”—stories with their own “weird logic.” (Groff’s description of this aesthetic preference lands better than her diatribe against the first-person point of view, which precedes 12 of 20 stories in first-person.) In finding weird, spiky stories, Groff leans hard—and often thrillingly—on early-career writers. There is Katherine Damm’s sparkling and funny “The Happiest Day of Your Life,” featuring a young husband freewheeling into drunkenness at a wedding reception for his wife’s ex-boyfriend. In Suzanne Wang’s inventive “Mall of America,” AI narrates a tale of corporate (and all-too-human) woe when an elderly man spends time after hours in the mall’s arcade. Madeline Ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps” recounts the tense relationship between two neighbors with a complicated history. In Steven Duong’s “Dorchester,” a young writer has a poem go viral after an anti-Asian hate crime.
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780063275959
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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