The creepy archaisms and deliberately fruity neo-Victorian style used to devastating effect in the best of these vivid...
A solid third collection (following Houses Without Doors, 1990, and Wild Animals, 1984) of the veteran horror writer's insidious and disturbing short fiction, featuring two already famous stories.
“The Ghost Village,` winner of a World Fantasy Award, is a Vietnam combat tale (with interesting echoes of Straub's novel Koko); a partial homage to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in its revelations of what happens to a soldier `forced to confront extreme experience directly`—and of the shapes assumed by an embattled village's collective guilt. The highly praised `Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff` offers a similar nod to Melville's Beckett-like `Bartleby the Scrivener.` The story concerns a highborn attorney who, outraged by his wife's infidelity, hires the eponymous private `consultant` team to punish the adulteress—and, in a series of grimly funny, increasingly ghastly episodes, learns the full extent of their enigmatic promise that `our work brings about permanent changes which can never be undone.` It's the best thing Straub has yet written. Of the five other stories, one is a fairly conventional (though skillfully constructed) tale of a secretive `travel writer's` real (criminal) mission in Paris (`Isn't It Romantic?`); two (`Ashputtle` and `Hunger, an Introduction`) are stylized monologues that portray the makings of two very different homicidal maniacs; and `Porkpie Hat` is an overly convoluted tale about a Mississippi backwater murder and haunting set also in the world of jazz and jazzmen Straub obviously loves. And the superb `Bunny is Good Bread` traces with unnerving precision (and in horrific detail) the stages through which an emotionally and sexually abused boy grows into a righteous psychopathic killer; it's one of the most unnerving of Straub's several dramatizations of the ways that children perceive adults as monsters threatening to destroy them.
The creepy archaisms and deliberately fruity neo-Victorian style used to devastating effect in the best of these vivid stories suggest that Straub might think of undertaking a full-dress historical horror novel, something along the lines of Caleb Carr's The Alienist. You have to believe he has the chops for it.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50393-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
IN THE NEWS
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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