With the whiff of classic pulp fiction about them, these chilling tales pack a giddy wallop and make staying up late to read...
These short stories are dappled in Americana, but something not-quite-right lies just beneath the surface, threatening the appearance of calm.
Each of the 35 stories turns on a twist ending, none of which will be spoiled here. The title novella sends a family into turmoil when their friend and neighbor James Wilkinson is suspected of being a serial killer. That it turns out to be true is not the big reveal; the horror stems from why the killer chose this particular neighborhood and these neighbors. “The Man with X-Ray Eyes” is narrated by a man whose gift is not seeing bones but humanity; those who come up short don’t fare well under his gaze, and if he occasionally misjudges? More’s the pity. In “The Box,” a mother makes a gruesome find and traces it to one of her children; it’s a deft bit of writing, as Chizmar feints toward one suspect only to make the reader’s original suspicion a surprising revelation. Some of these tales clock in at under 10 pages, yet each creates a credible world, and often a beautiful one; a beloved fishing hole or the details of a work shed or pickup truck ring true...right up until the tentacles appear. “Ditch Treasures” conjures up a list of great finds made by workmen along the shoulder of I-95 in Maryland: “A framed velvet Elvis. / A George Foreman grill still in the box…. / A loaded handgun.” The narrator goes on to describe his ultimate find, one that lights him up with visions of tabloid fame and working-class fortune, until he gets close enough to wish he’d never seen it at all. Once again the commonplace setting makes the otherworldly that much more credible and frightening.
With the whiff of classic pulp fiction about them, these chilling tales pack a giddy wallop and make staying up late to read just one more mandatory.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2016
ISBN: 9781596067936
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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