Lots of suspense writers can keep you turning pages far into the night. But how many others can keep you starting story...
Except for the juvenilia collected in One Night Stands (not reviewed) and the ten Keller stories in Hit Man (1998), of which Block has chosen three, the 71 tales in this indispensable volume represent the complete short fiction of one of the genre’s giants. Most of the stories are familiar from the three earlier collections reprinted in full—Sometimes They Bite, Like a Lamb to Slaughter (1984), and Some Days You Get the Bear (1993). But Block sweetens the pot with several variable hardcover debuts, including one new story apiece about burglar/bookseller Bernie Rhodenbarr (a clever but transparent locked room), Nero Wolfe wannabe Leo Haig and his sidekick Chip Harrison (a charming in-joke for mystery buffs), genially unscrupulous attorney Martin Ehrengraf (a five-finger exercise), and alcoholic shamus Matthew Scudder (an atmospheric sketch), as well as early studies for the Scudder novels When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986) and A Dance at the Slaughterhouse (1991). More consistently rewarding are the five new non-series entries in which Block—like Ed Gorman, his only serious rival among contemporary writers of crime short stories—honors his pulp roots by taking them seriously. Like all the best short stories, each of them, from the badger game turned murderous to the fatalistic ex-con trying vainly to go straight, seems less created than discovered, dug up from dark places and carved to gemlike brightness.
Lots of suspense writers can keep you turning pages far into the night. But how many others can keep you starting story after story, popping just one more poisoned chocolate, hours after you meant to turn out the light?Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-75282-544-5
Page Count: 754
Publisher: Orion/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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