Some of these stories are thin and ineffective, but those that work dig deeply into our innermost, darkest fears.
A collection of stories about the way people are affected by the sometimes-unsettling and even violent things that happen to them or others.
The 13 stories in Laskowski’s second collection (Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons, 2012) exude an ominous and haunting atmosphere. The subject matter is always fairly ordinary, deceptively banal, but just below the surface lurk quiet terrors. The first story, “The Witness,” is about a female bystander who sees a car hit a young boy—his body flew onto the street like a “sheet of paper.” Marie’s obsession with the accident and the man who drove the car leads to profound consequences for her marriage. Tension oozes out of many of these stories. A couple keeps sneaking into a man’s apartment in “The Cat-Sitter” to fondle his things and have sex. In one of the best, “There’s Someone Behind You,” a woman who has secretly been seeing a married man hides in his backyard on Halloween night in order to glimpse the man’s wife in the house. Feeling excited and wicked, she quietly calls out the woman’s name, over and over, confident she won’t come out. A woman becomes obsessed with a co-worker’s murderer in “Death Wish.” Couples—mothers and fathers—and their children populate the stories. There’s a supernatural element and plenty of tension in “The Monitor.” Myra and Corey are given a video monitor to observe their baby, a “colicky, fussy little thing.” Some nights a frightened Myra thinks she’s seeing another baby. Turns out the video is coming from a family’s monitor across the street. Then she starts seeing a little boy walking around the room; they have no boy. There are shades of “The Yellow Wallpaper” in this terrific story. Laskowski’s fine workings of tales that go creepy in the night make her a writer to watch.
Some of these stories are thin and ineffective, but those that work dig deeply into our innermost, darkest fears.Pub Date: May 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939650-38-2
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Santa Fe Writers Project
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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