People who think they don’t like horror stories are going to be very surprised.
Three novellas by a little-known master of horror visit luxurious locations in the twilight zone.
In his introduction to this collection, Daniel Handler finds himself at a loss for words to describe the work of Ingalls (Times Like These, 2005, etc.)—the best he can come up with is “psychological.” So he writes to the author, an American in her late 70s who has lived in the U.K. for more than 50 years. She suggests “a combination of fable, fairytale, and Romance….Maybe that is Gothic.” Whatever their genre, the stories are wry, elegant, and terrifying. The first, I See a Long Journey—also the longest and the best—is Edith Wharton meets Shirley Jackson. It begins in a leisurely fashion, describing how Flora happened to marry James, the scion of “one of the richest families on the Eastern seaboard,” detailing the marriages of the other siblings and getting into a bit of family politics. When Flora and James decide to take a vacation, with their bodyguard, even that unfurls slowly, with the couple dawdling in the airport gift shop buying gifts for their children before they have even left. When they get to their destination and begin to while away the days shopping, eating, and visiting a local oracle, what we have suspected is confirmed—Flora has a raging secret crush on the bodyguard. You will have absolutely no idea where this story is going until it gets there, though when you read it again, as you well might, you see the author almost came out and told you several times. The second is almost a Rocky Horror Picture Show setup—a couple gets lost on their way to visit the eponymous Friends in the Country and winds up fogged in at a mansion with bizarre company and very, very bad food. On Ice sends a nice American girl on a ski vacation with her German boyfriend—but it is certainly not about skiing.
People who think they don’t like horror stories are going to be very surprised.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-94043-644-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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