A memorable batch of unnerving tales.
Migliore’s short story collection dishes out dread, violence, and gallows humor in equal measure.
In “Museum of the Dead,” a man inherits his mortician father’s funeral home. There isn’t much he can do with it, as a miracle drug has all but eliminated natural death; that is, until he meets someone who may be able to help him “drum up some business.” Other tales herein are equally somber: In “The MacGuffin,” a woman trails a dizzying string of text messages from an anonymous person claiming to have kidnapped her daughter. “Popular Genocide” unfolds at a therapeutic boarding school that feels more like a prison camp. Nevertheless, particular moments or even entire stories are funny, though the comedy is decidedly dark. “Fandomon” is an amusing play on Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon: Several characters involved in an incident at an anime convention relay their versions of something that happened in a hotel room. Each person’s bizarre account, despite similarities, is drastically different from the rest. Two of the best stories are the interlinked “The Running of the Dead Horse” and “Ancestry,” which bookend this collection. In the former, university professor Rita is shaken by her younger sister’s violent murder, especially as the recording of the event is readily available online. Her Italian grandfather, who helped raise the sisters, takes her on a journey to Rome to see family and later enact a bit of vengeance. The latter story finds Rita and a police captain looking into a shocking suicide and a mysterious organization tied to her late parents.
The author’s tales navigate through such bleak territories as homicide, nuclear strikes, and other assorted crimes. It’s hardly surprising that violence marks many of the stories, from bites and stabbings to meticulously detailed head shots. But Migliore deftly leavens the heaviness with satire: The dialogue-only “Suicide Hotline” features a crisis counselor whose prepared script implacably renders their responses mechanical and hollow. The author displays a knack for direct, concise sentences that stoke the narrative pace: “Trinice wiggled around. Her damp suit made the seat slippery. She couldn’t lean back because her arms were cuffed behind her. She was forced to press the side of her head up against the bulletproof glass divider.” While well-drawn characters (including Rita and her grandfather) pop up throughout this collection, the cast is largely aloof or hateful. They spew homophobic, xenophobic, and generally offensive slurs and sentiments that complement the savage acts they perpetrate. Readers won’t sympathize with most of them, particularly the nasty American soldier stationed in Japan who seems to detest everything and everyone (“The Tattoo”). Stories such as these aren’t prone to happy endings, but that doesn’t make the book predictable. “Anticks,” which follows a ventriloquist and his maybe-alive doll, alludes to the 1978 film Magic that seemingly inspired it; despite that grounding, the story spins off into an unexpected and deliriously entertaining direction.
A memorable batch of unnerving tales.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798890272515
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Dorrance
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
