Bang retells five variously "scary" folktales from as many countries (sources not provided) and illustrates them in black and white with a broadly gruesome band of naked Halloween hobgoblins. The first story — about the old man with a disfiguring wen who finally loses it when goblins take it as insurance that he will return to their dance — is the most awkwardly told, with the old man making superfluous comments such as "Oh! I fell asleep!" and "What a terrible song!" (and then inexplicably wanting to dance and sing himself though there is no indication that the goblins' song has become any less terrible). Other selections, about the dullwitted "Boy Who Wanted to Learn to Shudder" or the Chinese son who retrieves his long lost father from fish-monsters who had kept him to play "Soccer on the Lake," are adequate versions of well known tales, and one, about the old Japanese woman, aided by a nun, who crosses an abacus bridge to rescue her daughter from a goblins' castle, has a climax reminiscent of Mosel's more skillfully developed Funny Little Woman (KR, 1972), but with a twist: when the goblins drink up the river to stop the women's escape by boat, the giggles that send the water back out of their mouths are brought about when the nun, the old woman and the daughter "lean right over and show (their) bare white bottom(s)!" That should be good for a startled hugh, but only the grisly Irish tale of a dead man who eats blood and tries to pull young Mary Cullane into the grave with him will make you shudder.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1973
ISBN: 0844663603
Page Count: 66
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1973
BOOK REVIEW
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
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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