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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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