Often horrific, relentlessly stark, and truly unforgettable.
Day (Necrosaurus Rex, 2014) offers 11 dark tales teeming with monstrous beings.
It’s fitting that so many characters in this horror short story collection are surrounded by death. William, the groundskeeper for the Reed family in “The Ghosts in Winter’s Wake,” for example, had a sister who was murdered, and both his mother and Philip, the youngest Reed child, died in the snow. The latter loss conjures up somber memories, which may be causing William to hear voices. Similar tragedies befall the main characters of “Snow Like Lonely Ghosts…” and the genuinely unsettling “Bright Red Mess,” both of whom have lost their mothers. These tales both delve into the shadowy side of humanity; some characters are unhinged while others are sane but simply evil. Vile creatures abound in other stories: some friends soon regret swimming in the vicinity of a rumored Volkswagen-sized turtle in “Chomp Chomp,” and there may be validity to the warning from Tim’s grandfather about a witch in “Spoiling.” Day showcases his versatility in the last two tales: “Beast Mode” abandons chills in favor of action, as vengeance-seeking bikers make the mistake of attacking a werewolf on his wedding day. It’s a visceral piece, rife with blood, biting, and bullets, this time making the monster the protagonist (complete with a romance) and the purely human characters far more ghastly. In the closer, “GG Allin and the Final Flight of the Chrysanthemum Byzantium,” the late, infamous real-life rocker of the title gets a pass out of hell and the gift of immortality. It’s a gleefully odd sci-fi/fantasy hybrid, and exactly how GG stays immortal is best left unspoiled. Prefacing each story are Spooner’s (Dead Men, 2015, etc.) stunning black-and-white illustrations, which look as if they’ve been scratched onto the pages. They accentuate the already haunting descriptions, such as this passage from “Snow Like Lonely Ghosts…”: “Snow falls thick, like meat, and covers damn near everything but the persistence of man….The cold outside is patient, aches bones, like the pain of being lonely.”
Often horrific, relentlessly stark, and truly unforgettable.Pub Date: July 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945373-89-3
Page Count: 138
Publisher: JournalStone
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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