Gloomy, suspenseful, and sometimes messy tales.
A collection offers short stories with dark themes.
In an introduction to this volume, Fennell notes: “For the longest time, I couldn’t write directly about mental health.” Nonfiction could not clearly convey his experiences “as someone who lived and loved next to” mental health disorders, and so he opted for fiction: a different kind of truth. Death and familial dysfunction haunt these tales. In the opening story, “Under a Big Moon,” a mother sips a concoction of lemonade and antifreeze. Women who have lost custody of their children turn to drinking and sex work. Kids are frequently orphaned and babies are occasionally murdered, their faces “stiff and blue with dead round eyes pointing to the sky.” The ambitious collection works best in two ways. First, when one story calls back to another. In “The Witch in the Woods,” the title character offers a child a glass of lemonade and the kid thinks “with antifreeze,” skillfully echoing “Under a Big Moon.” More impressive is when a tale finds moments of tenderness to balance the bleakness—a dying man fondly remembers sunshine and his children going off to school. Yet the collection often delivers a single tone: grim. Many of Fennell’s stories, which employ different narrative techniques, create effective tension and suspense. For example, one tale is narrated in direct address: “You look amazing, but there is no one there to tell you, and so I whisper it to you.” Another story is narrated in the third person: “She came out there, and the young girl, Rachael, looked at the…woman.” Unfortunately, some of the tales are confusing. The dialogue is frequently not inside quotation marks and lacks tags to identify the speakers. Readers will find it difficult to disentangle what is dialogue, who the speakers are, and what is narration. The result is that the audience must search for clarity.
Gloomy, suspenseful, and sometimes messy tales.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77728-101-4
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Firenze Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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