Dark, brooding fiction from a master of the form. And take our word for it: don’t go up to the attic, even if it is just a...
“Did I say he was dead? What I said was, he is…gone.” Welcome to an odd world in which the dead never quite go away, and the living are—well, not quite there.
Readers of horror know, even if characters in movies and books do not, that it’s never a good idea to go up to the attic, even when it’s euphemized as “the upstairs junk room.” Bad things happen in such dark interior spaces, as the characters in Straub’s long opening story learn; in a narrative marked by a tenuous hold on time and an even more tenuous one on reality, an unfortunate young man finds that hypnosis is maybe not such a good idea after all, leading to an event that, the protagonist tells us, “virtually destroyed my family.” And not just virtually. Straub (In the Night Room, 2004, etc.), who, this collection ably reveals, has affinities with both Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, likes nothing more than a good, taut, psychologically charged yarn that raises more questions than it answers: “I thought of myself as a work of art,” a denizen of one fairy tale–like story remarks. “I caused responses without being responsible for them.” In a Straub-ian world, proper responses include puzzlement, nervousness, and fear, to say nothing of indulging in coprophiliac moments that are going to ruin some unfortunate housekeeper’s day. Denial is also allowed; as another of Straub’s characters yelps, bewildered at the thought that Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener” should be esteemed enough to be taught in school, “I never went to any college, but I do know that nothing means what it says, not on this planet.” That’s exactly right, one reason not to trust Straub’s narrators, whose worlds include an unhealthy amount of free-floating anger and not a little craziness—though if anger and craziness can bring a taxi-flattened cat back to life, then so much the better.
Dark, brooding fiction from a master of the form. And take our word for it: don’t go up to the attic, even if it is just a junk room.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54105-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
PROFILES
IN THE NEWS
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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