Spencer is a heck of a storyteller and has an undeniable way with words. A very readable collection of oddities from a pro,...
Spencer (The Ocean and All Its Devices, 2005, etc.), best known for his Lovecraft-ian tales, offers an intriguing collection of nine stories and one poem.
In “The Tenth Muse,” an author, Marshall Harrison, is invited to interview the famously reclusive Morton Sky, whose only novel became an instant classic when it was published. Marshall’s family lived next door to Sky when he was a child, and he’s excited to speak with someone he so admired, but Marshall must confront the darkness in his own past, and Sky, desperate to write something new, will do anything for inspiration. The oddly sweet, fairy-tale flavored “Come Lurk With Me and Be My Love” features a man named Wally Bennett, who falls for a beautiful girl named Flower, and she’s not quite what she seems. Wally will follow her anywhere, even to her ancient father’s lair deep inside a mountain, bringing new meaning to “will do anything for love.” In the genuinely creepy “Penguins of the Apocalypse,” an alcoholic father is approached by Derrick Thorn, a “large pear-shaped man, smooth-faced, hairless as a cave salamander,” whose “face [is] oddly blurred.” Thorn offers up a bargain, setting off a chain of catastrophic events. Is he real or imagined? That’s for readers to decide. “Stone and the Librarian” is a fever dream that will delight fans of classic lit. A being called the Librarian, a shadowy figure from the future, insists society has been brought down because of a lack of empathy and the “absence of humanity” and that salvation lies only in works of great literature. A world of zeppelins and old-fashioned adventure awaits readers in “The Dappled Thing," and Spencer gets back to his Lovecraft-ian roots in “How the Gods Bargain,” “Usurped,” and the poem “The Love Song of A. Alhazred Azathoth.” The title story is a terrifying and poignant tale of an unconventional therapist whose new patient awakens something in him, resulting in salvation for them both.
Spencer is a heck of a storyteller and has an undeniable way with words. A very readable collection of oddities from a pro, sure to please old fans and new readers alike.Pub Date: July 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59606-831-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
Told through the points of view of the four Garcia sisters- Carla, Sandi, Yolanda and Sofia-this perceptive first novel by poet Alvarez tells of a wealthy family exiled from the Dominican Republic after a failed coup, and how the daughters come of age, weathering the cultural and class transitions from privileged Dominicans to New York Hispanic immigrants. Brought up under strict social mores, the move to the States provides the girls a welcome escape from the pampered, overbearingly protective society in which they were raised, although subjecting them to other types of discrimination. Each rises to the challenge in her own way, as do their parents, Mami (Laura) and Papi (Carlos). The novel unfolds back through time, a complete picture accruing gradually as a series of stories recounts various incidents, beginning with ``Antojos'' (roughly translated ``cravings''), about Yolanda's return to the island after an absence of five years. Against the advice of her relatives, who fear for the safety of a young woman traveling the countryside alone, Yolanda heads out in a borrowed car in pursuit of some guavas and returns with a renewed understanding of stringent class differences. ``The Kiss,'' one of Sofia's stories, tells how she, married against her father's wishes, tries to keep family ties open by visiting yearly on her father's birthday with her young son. And in ``Trespass,'' Carla finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice a year after the Garcias have arrived in America, culminating with a pervert trying to lure her into his car. In perhaps one of the most deft and magical stories, ``Still Lives,'' young Sandi has an extraordinary first art lesson and becomes the inspiration for a statue of the Virgin: ``Dona Charito took the lot of us native children in hand Saturday mornings nine to twelve to put Art into us like Jesus into the heathen.'' The tradition and safety of the Old World are just part of the tradeoff that comes with the freedom and choice in the New. Alvarez manages to bring to attention many of the issues-serious and light-that immigrant families face, portraying them with sensitivity and, at times, an enjoyable, mischievous sense.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-945575-57-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
PROFILES
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