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THE RAPTURE INDEX

Name: THE RAPTURE INDEX
Author: Molly Reid
ISBN: 978-1-942683-82-7

by Molly Reid ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2019

Promising work from a writer interested in all creatures, great and small.

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Animals are animals, and humans are animals too in Reid's imaginative debut collection of 13 stories and eight pieces of flash fiction (here called bestiaries).

A bestiary is traditionally a tale about animals, usually offering a moral lesson. In Reid's fictional universe, animals are everywhere, but more often than not, they symbolize nothing. In "Happy You're Here," the collection's strong first story, a dead whale, washed up across from the hospital where the narrator's mother is dying, is reduced to a sad spectacle. People come with picnic baskets in anticipation of the body being blown up and, later, hack it to pieces. The story's final image—"flying blubber like falling stars"—is both poignant and hilarious. Elsewhere, we see her characters’ misguided attempts to make everything in the natural world reflect human matters. "Summer People" features Shasta, a newlywed whose life feels claustrophobic. When she frees her creepy neighbor's parrots because "it felt good, like she was doing something good," she realizes too late that she's done the birds no favors. In "Anatomy Is Destiny," a woman on a sexy weekend with her lover becomes convinced that hummingbirds are talking to her instead of owning her own discomfort with her icky boyfriend. In fact, most animals are utterly indifferent to human concerns, as Reid shows in many of her darkly comic bestiaries. The real beasts in these magical stories are, of course, humans: creatures of lust and cruelty, deception and selfishness. But Reid, to her great credit, doesn't resort to cynicism. In the collection's strongest stories ("The Permutations of A," "Adventures in Wildlife," and "The Rapture Index"), Reid reveals a talent for discovering the humanity of her flawed human characters.

Promising work from a writer interested in all creatures, great and small.

Pub Date: May 14, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-942683-82-7

Page Count: 227

Publisher: BOA Editions

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.