A fantastic assortment of tall tales that look for little miracles in the mundane.
A kaleidoscope of microfictions about small things with big feelings.
Opening with a love note to a cockroach and interspersed with black-and-white illustrations, this collection by author and illustrator Schluter is a showy, whimsical cacophony of delights and grotesqueries. In the opener, “30th Birthday Story,” the author is confronted with three versions of himself at different ages, while a decidedly different joke is played on another doppelgänger in “Imaginary Children.” English majors will have fun with the literary humor in “Example of a Plotline” and “Parable of the Very Narrative Structure at Play in this Parable,” as well as the unexpected surprise of “The Radio,” which simply…fades away. There’s almost a fairy-tale quality to characters like The Girl Who Is a Piece of Paper, in “A Story Narrated by the Boy Who Collects Flies on His Face,” and The Widow Who Had Never Been in Love in “The Long-Term Relationship.” Misunderstandings abound, from a heated argument with a dog in “Civil Discourse,” to the unfulfilled potential in “Parable of the Perfect Translator.” There’s also a whole bunch of anthropomorphizing, for readers who dug David Sedaris’ Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (2010). The narrator must first address the concerns of his appliances in “Handwritten Account of an Afternoon Spent Talking with the Microwave,” before introducing a cast in “While the Two Slugs Take Turns Drinking Shots of Vodka” that includes a drunk, a poet, and a raccoon in a doctor’s coat in a few of its speaking roles. Finally, for Monty Python fans, two stories with parrots—“Everyone Has Dreams They Have To Hide From the State” and “The Long-Term Relationship.” In short, a little bit of everything, from the unexpected intimacy at play in “Walking Along the Avenue of the Suicides, the Cockroach” to the sweetness of “The Clairvoyant Mother.”
A fantastic assortment of tall tales that look for little miracles in the mundane.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780872869288
Page Count: 136
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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