A dazzling collection of satisfying tales consistent in theme, dexterity, and impressive execution.
A volume offers sweet and savory short stories grounded by the human condition.
San Antonio poet and author Salinas bases his 40-tale collection primarily on his South Texas homeland, where characters deal with love, young adult angst and insecurity, death, and the bonds of family. The homespun opening story, “Places,” is a first-person–narrated winner about a divorced son mourning his mother’s death. In a family hobbled by the father’s sudden abandonment, the only saving grace appears when the protagonist’s estranged bachelor brother returns home. The interactions between fatherless brothers also populate other tales, like “Even-Steven,” in which two siblings discuss the life-changing “accident” that scarred them both. Simmering with anger and guilt, the brothers attempt a resolution while perched on the edge of a cliff. Straightforward and bare-knuckle, the author’s characters have no hidden agendas. Men consider women who have blond hair but brown eyes instead of blue to be “prisoners of predetermination”; White folks in South Texas comically dub themselves “white Mexican’t.” For the most part, these are stories about people for whom the struggle is very real. They may be short on cash, luck, and education, but they are rich in their experiences with life’s simple pleasures and the satisfactions of a good day’s work. Some tales veer off into their own worlds, as when a young man questions the identity of a trainee at a starship academy. The rest are indelibly human, best represented in the endearingly bittersweet first date at an IHOP between a nerd who does impressions and a community college “trailer-park girl.” Collectively, these stories represent life’s imperfections, and Salinas is skilled in mapping out the bones of his tales in an economy of pages. He is adept at cleverly outlining characters and their concerns while creating a variety of situations that will engulf readers. The drawback to this writerly flair is that readers will often find themselves at the finales wanting more, as in “Coke Machine,” the tale of a mall janitor assisting a shopper obsessed with a wall that she believes conceals a vault. The same can be said of the title story, involving a young, restless, likable insurance worker whose magical thinking seems to be the only thing giving him hope for the future.
A dazzling collection of satisfying tales consistent in theme, dexterity, and impressive execution.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73617-796-9
Page Count: 278
Publisher: San Antonio Review
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A ridiculous concept imbued with gravity, charm, humor, plausible cynicism, and pathos—and perhaps the merest touch of spite.
A Wallace & Gromit dream is more of a nightmare in this darkly farcical science fantasy in which the moon inexplicably becomes…well, not green, but decidedly dairy.
When the moon and every lunar sample on Earth transform into a cheese-like substance, it seems amusing at first, but the appearance of this newly organic, extremely unstable satellite has far-reaching, apocalyptic consequences. A variety of U.S. citizens—disappointed astronauts from newly cancelled lunar missions, scientists whose understanding of the universe has been entirely upended, writers frantically adapting their pitches, retirees at a rural diner finding solace in their friendship, a small church community looking for divine answers, bickering cheese-shop owners whose product gets both welcome and unwelcome attention, the ultra-wealthy owner of an aerospace company with a spectacularly self-involved agenda, bank executives seeking a financial angle, and government officials desperately scheduling press conferences—respond in ways grand and petty, generous and self-serving. Those responses can only escalate when a cheesy lunar fragment threatens to destroy all life on our planet. Scalzi’s premise is absurd, but it’s merely the pretext to take a multifaceted, satiric look at how Americans deal with large-scale crisis, something we’re abundantly and recently familiar with, and will no doubt experience again in the not-so-distant future. He writes of denial, conspiracy theories, anger directed at the wrong people, unscrupulous political machinations, and multiple attempts at profiting from the end of the world, for as long as it lasts. There are moments of unexpected kindness and generosity, too. Of course, Scalzi takes aim at his favorite corporate, social, and government targets, as well as at the cheap sentiment that crisis always seems to inspire (as exemplified by a catastrophic Saturday Night Live episode).
A ridiculous concept imbued with gravity, charm, humor, plausible cynicism, and pathos—and perhaps the merest touch of spite.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780765389091
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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