Book Review: Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers

 By Matthew Sparks (editor), Olivia Sizemore (illustrator)

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Folktales

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth Bookstore, Lexington, during the Kentucky Book Fair 

• Why I bought this book: The authors talked me into it  

 ******

     Just so you know: A haint is sort of like a ghost, likely someone or something that appears where the distance between the supernatural world and our world is thin, meaning spirits sometimes cross over. A booger is cryptid, an animal or person that has grown out of proportion on the other side. Stained earth is a place where something evil happened, and the spirits are restless. High strangeness is just something weird that happened and cannot be easily explained. 

    Haint Country is the Appalachian dialect terms for where all these things occur.

    If you pick up this book -- and you should -- you must read the forward and introduction to these tales. It'll teach you a thing or two and make them a lot more believable to you all.

    I swear to god and hope to die if I'm lyin'.

    Moving on, you'll find this an eclectic collection of tales told mostly in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, the heart of Appalachian Kentucky, mostly from Lee, Owsley, Clay, Leslie, Perry, and Harlan counties. They have been handed down from family to family, friend to friend, some outright invented, and some recalled to explain a curious sight or occurrence.

      The tales are written -- or told to others over time -- by various authors, some of who are credited with more than one. 

    They have been told after dark on overnight fishing trips, in a school yard to explain why no one goes down that creepy corridor, or to a spouse to excuse lateness or a lack of pants.*

    Some are to remember the victims of the mining disasters that occurred regularly in Kentucky history and still haunt entire communities. Others explain the strange feelings one gets when passing a forgotten cemetery or jailhouse. 

    But some are just old tales told around the campfire when the stars come out and the night gets dark and spooky. The drawbacks with these are they sound like the least likely explanation for a simple event, like why a house brunt down, but the tellers insist that every word is true and verified by anyone with a lick of sense. This is mostly a problem in the second part of the book, when the good ol' boys think of something they saw on television.**

    The tales in the first part of the book seem more like those told and retold as a potentially plausible, maybe if you squint real hard, explanation. Or something told after a bunch of people got together to recollect why the old barn burnt down, and try to outdo each other with wild explanations after too much moonshine.

    The longest story concerns the spooking of a house in Breathitt County, most likely by Mary Jane Fox, who apparently didn't like the changes made -- or the fact that her husband killed her when they lived in the previous house on the site. 

-----------------------------------------------------

* See Paw Hensley and the Naked Haint Woman of Squabble Creek, attributed to Hensley Sparks, "a walking, talking tall tale, born and raised in Clay County, Kentucky."

** See The Legend of The John Asher's UFO, (an episode of X-Files, no less) "dedicated to the memory of Patrick Smith, who was also a witness to the events" in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

Book Review: Your Utopia

 By Bora Chung

• Translated by: Anton Hur

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Short Stories

• Where I bought this book: Barnes & Noble, Florence, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I thoroughly enjoyed Cursed Bunny, Chung's first collection of stories 

 ********* 

   Normally, when reviewing a book, I focus on the author's writing, the quality and imagination of the story, and the telling moments that give the book its star rating. A good story, well told, is what I'm looking for.

    But here, I'm just going to let the author's descriptive writing and fierce imagination speak for itself. The following is a snippet from the tale Maria, Gratia Plena, ostensibly about the investigation of a women thought to be a drug dealer. This part is about a dream the investigator has after looking into the woman's thoughts and memories, which included details about the Cassini mission.

         In my dream, I am a planet. A small, unmanned spacecraft comes up to me, circling me. Whenever it moves, its tiny bright lights sparkle. In that vast bleakness that is the black of space, the spacecraft twinkles its little lights and stays by my side. I am a happy planet.

           But a few days after our first encounter, the spacecraft begins to move away. I shout after it.

           "But why?" 

           The spacecraft does not reply. Blinking its tiny little lights that I love so much, it goes farther and farther away.

           "But why? But why?" 

        It pays my pathetic cries no mind as it continues to go farther toward destruction. When it starts to fall into the fires of the sun, I am woken from my sleep.

           My phone is ringing.

    This collection is mostly about life sometime in the future, when intelligent machines dominate our lives. They have emotions, thoughts, and memories. These are their stories.

    It's a strange future, which gives voice to some of our greatest fears about technology, but like Pandora's Jar, it remains oddly full of hope.

Book Review: You Like it Darker

   By Stephen King

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Short Stories

• Where I bought this book: Barnes & Nobel, Florence, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: If you have to ask ...  

 *****

  

   Random thoughts that arose while reading King's latest collection. (May contain spoilers, but I tried to make them non-specific.)

    It's a collection of stories by Stephen King, so tropes will abound. But aliens? Aliens who save us? 

    Indeed, some of King's worst flaws -- overwriting, repetition, and echoes of and references to  previous tales -- abound and get a little tiresome after a while. An editor could fix that. Perhaps listen to her?

    Geography nitpick. If you live in Upper Manhattan, you cannot walk nine blocks to Central Park. 

    Too many of the stories centered around the fears and meanderings of an old white guy. (OK, some were about middle-aged white guys.)  Rattlesnakes, the sequel to Cujo, highlighted this trend. It went on and on and on and on -- and on and on -- sort of like the original. 

    The bizarre "I had a dream" alibi in the midst of a police procedural led by a bizarre police detective was, well, quite bizarre.

   Starting a story about a man named Finn (should have been Fionn) with a nod to the Pogues is brilliant.

     Laurie -- an oddly overly detailed story about an old man getting a dog -- may be the worst King story ever written. And yes, I believe I have read them all.  

     The final two stories, Dreamers and The Answer Man, are easily the best of the lot. They bumped the number of stars to the midpoint. 

    The title made little sense for this collection. I didn't find any of the stories particularly dark. King has written quite a few, but these don't measure up.

Book Review: Walk the Blue Fields

 By Claire Keegan

• Pub Date: 2017

• Genre: Short Stories

• Where I bought this book: The Bookery, Cincinnati 

• Why I bought this book: I've been grabbing everything I find by this author 

 ******

    A strong collection of ordinary stories about ordinary Irish people going about their daily affairs, accepting their fate with its gloom and loneliness, but always hinting at and hoping for more.

    It's full not of happy-go-lucky folks basking in the glory of the green fields of ole Ireland, but of a melancholy people frustrated by their limitations, squinting up at the sky hoping for a bit of the sun, but enduring the muddy fields and the rain soaking in their shoes.

     Whether they are priest or farmer or soldier or mother, shopper or shopkeeper, Keegan gets inside their hearts and heads, exploring desires amidst exhilarated sadness. She shows lives full of abuse, conflict, and desolation. She pulls no punches, writing her stories with a gift for description and an eye for the pedestrian nature of daily life.

    In the opening story, The Parting Gift, she tells a common tale -- a young woman emigrating to American, not with stars in her eyes, but a hope that no matter what happens there, her life will be better -- or at least different. In Keegan's descriptions, nothing is extraordinary in the girl's preparations, as her mother speaks to her from another room.

                    "You'll have a boiled egg?"

                    "No thanks, Ma."

                    "You'll have something?"

                    "Later on, maybe."

                    "I'll put one on for you."

    It's a scene played out in households throughout Ireland over the years, and Keegan, without sentimentality, captures it perfectly.

    She has honed her craft well. In The Forester's Daughter, she tells of a man and his family trying to do well, but failing miserably, with instances of abuse, cruelty, and neglect taken as a matter of course.

    In the title story, she writes about a priest examining his own life while consecrating the wedding of a well-to-do Irish couple. It's summed up by the priest's thinking that "Anytime promises are made in public, people cry."

Book Review: Thirteen Ways of Looking

  By Colum McCann

• Pub Date: 2015

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I love me a good collection of Irish short stories. 

 *****

 

  I am sad that I was generally disappointed in this collection of a novella and three short stories. I have liked several of the author's previous works.

    OK. The stories themselves were decent. The last one, Treaty, about a aging Catholic nun who comes face-to-face with her living nightmare, was thoughtful and compelling. But that one suffered from a flaw the others were far more guilty of, and unexpected from such an accomplished writer: A general lack of focus, using too many words, too much excess description, too much meaningless detail and too many strained metaphors  

    But let's start with the good. Treaty involves Sister Beverly, a nun living in a care home in Long Island, concerned about her health and wondering if her religious life has been a waste. She's forgetful, ill at ease, and unable to feel comfortable in her old age. Then on the television, she sees a man who looks very much like an older version of person who raped her a long time ago. 

    The story deals with perception, pain, horror, and regret. She relives her pain, but does not want to dwell on it as the defining point of her life. Would God want her to reveal the monster -- if that is what he is -- or forgive his actions? Her thoughts and behaviors are deeply compelling, and McCann's tale paints a masterful image.

    Contrast that to the main story, about Peter J. Mendelssohn,  an aging white guy, an immigrant, a Jew, a lawyer, and a former judge in Brooklyn. He's retired, and now living -- and dying -- in a fancy apartment on the Upper East Side. He's had a good life, despite an upbringing in anti-Semitic Europe. But now his days are all about his pains, his diminished capacity, his beloved but now dead wife, and his terse relationship with his egotistical son. 

    But unlike Sister Beverly, his story is not about reflection and regret. It's about him, his thoughts, and his dying. And, quite frankly, his life and story are not all that interesting for the amount of effort it takes to read about it.

    The other two stories, Sh'khol, and What Time is it Now, Where are You? also fall flat.

Book Review: So Late in the Day

 By Claire Keegan

• Pub Date: 2023

• Where I bought this book: Athena Books, Greenwich, Conn. 

• Why I bought this book: Long known in her native Ireland, Keegan's books are now being published in the United States. And that is good. 

 *********

    

    I am normally not a fan of verbing nouns. But when Keegan wrote "the speaker jargoned on" I began to question my existence and my crotchets.

    It was the perfect phrase for a tedious experience. And that is Keegan's strength. She can take the mundane, and with some well-chosen words, turn reading about it into one of life's pleasures.

    Whether it's riding a bus, making coffee, even going to the bathroom, Keegan nails it. I am still enamored of her ability to turn a chicken crossing the road into a work of art.

    The setting is a woman taking a drive in the country.

On the edge of the road, a small, plump hen walked purposefully along, her head extended and her feet clambering over the stones. She was a pretty hen, her plumage edged in white, as though she'd powdered herself before she'd stepped out of the house. She hopped down onto the grassy verge and, without looking left or right, raced across the road, then stopped, re-adjusted her wings, and made a clear line for the cliff. The woman watched how the hen kept her head down when she reached the edge and how, without a moment's hesitation, she jumped over it. The woman stopped the car and walked to the spot from which the hen had flung herself. A part of her did not want to look over the cliff -- but when she did she there saw the hen with several others, scratching or lying contentedly in a pit of sand on a grassy ledge not far below.

    That single paragraph does what all writers strive for: showing, not telling, using simple but compelling language, making the ordinary become extraordinary. It was an aside to the actually story, a contextual anomaly, yet it has stuck with me.

    But later thinking about the snippet, I considered how, with her skillful use of pronouns, she mingled the hen's experience with one the woman was about to have.

______________________________

See reviews of Keegan's other books

 Foster and Small Things Like These

______________________________

    These are three tiny tales of women and men, about their failures at connecting with each other. The women, but mostly the men, talk not to each other, but at each other. In her language and descriptions, Keegan gives the stories a feminist twist. 

    In the title story, she tells of a young couple's broken engagement -- on the day of their wedding -- from the groom's perspective. Instead of being sympathetic, Keegan portrays him as a mess -- bitter, thoughtless, incompetent. But it's not a harsh account. She simply does so by showing Cathal's thoughts, words, and actions before and during the courtship.

    The Long and Painful Death is told from the view of a woman who stays at a writer's house to be inspired by his work. Instead, she is interrupted by an expert on the house she is renting, who is so interested in his own knowledge that he is obtuse to her disinterest in him. It's a clever, subtle take on mansplaining.

    Antarctica deals with a woman seeking to have an affair on a holiday weekend away from her family. (No spoiler here, the opening line of the story is "Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man. That weekend she was determined to find out.") Although it's another example of her exquisite writing, the story borders on being creepy. It is the reason the book failed to gain a full 10 out of 10 stars in my review.

Book Review: Homesickness

 By Colin Barrett

• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: Prologue Books, Columbus, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I'm a sucker for short story collections by Irish writers

 *****

 

   The writing here is lovely. The descriptions are spot on. The characters are people you might see passing on the street. They are well drawn and quirky, and you can see in them someone you know.

    But the stories are, shall we say, a bit mundane. They portray little more than a routine day in an ordinary life, sometimes trite, and a wee  bit confusing.

    I really wanted to like this book. The blurbs talked of emotion and originality, of people struggling to find a life beyond the normal.

   Oh, there are some shining moments. There are one-off characters you'd like to get to know better, such as Jess, who is asked a question while drinking in a pub. "Jess took her time before answering, as she took her time before answering any question. She was looking at him, and he was looking at her, and she was looking at him looking at her."

    I know these people -- the great football lad from a small town who falters when he moves to the big city, a wanna-be poet whose talent never goes beyond the local poetry slam. The characters include three orphans struggling with life on their own, and a family of brothers sitting in an Irish pub, looking for a bit of adventure.

    So the actors are there. The settings are classic: A kitchen. A workplace. A pub.

    But you want more. You want a tale to spark a glimmer of hope, despair, or meaning. You want substance, significance, a moment to savor. Instead, you get striking if strange characters, who simply live lives of quiet desperation.

Book Review: Blackberries, Blackberries

 By Crystal Wilkinson

• Pub Date: 2000

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: For the cover art -- and the title

********

    Short stories comprise many a genre, providing an outlet for stylish writing, whether it be a character study, a self-narrative, a moment in time, or a profile of home.

    The writing may be descriptive or stark. The story may be complete or part of a larger whole. But at their best, short stories allow writers to explore a small slice of life, of time, or of place.

    The best ones are concise, and telling.

    This collection takes all the options, to the benefit of the reader. The tales are brief, most less than 10 pages, some just two or three. But the stories they tell.

    Wilkinson grew up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, poor and Black, surrounded by family and community. She watched and listened. She learned to read people and reflect on their nature. She did it for survival, for the times to come, and for the hereafter. She captured their words and their messages. 

      Writing in the vernacular is hard, and often writers fail miserably. But Wilkinson nails it in ways hard to express. Indeed, the English language has few words to describe dialect that aren't degrading or dismissive, an subtle acknowledgement those who make such linguistic decisions look askance at such speaking or writing.

    But Wilkinson pulls it off, and it adds texture and character to her writing. Take for example, her story, Women's Secrets, in which a grandmother, Big Mama, cautions her daughter, Mama, who is young and looking for love wherever she may find it. Mama's daughter, our narrator, pays attention when Big Mama speaks.

I seen that Adams boy sniffing 'round here at your skirts but he ain't no count. Him nor his brothers. His daddy weren't no count neither. What he gonna give a family, girl? Ain't never gonna be nothing. Ain't got no learning. Ain't gonna never have no land. Gambling and carrying like sin.

    Later, in the same story, Big Mama gets more down home, unleashing her tongue and giving Mama a big heap of learnin.

"Chile, mens these times just ain't like your daddy." Big Mama takes a big loud breath and starts in on Mama again. "Ain't nare one of 'em no more than breath and britches, specially them Adams boys. Watch my words now girl, I'm telling you. Ain't good for not a damn. God in heaven forgive me but ain't good for not a damn. Breath and britches all they are."

      The stories are personal, and depend much on the relationships between women, particularly mothers and daughters. Their stories, literally, are about life and death. One, Waiting on the Reaper shows Wilkinson at her best, telling the tale of an old woman waiting to die, which she could have learned only by listening to a old woman waiting to die. 

    "I'm ready now," she said. "Ain't got too much time. Gonna see Lonnie and my little girlfriend that drowned in a well when I was ten."

Book Review: Full Dark, No Stars

 By Stephen King

• Pub Date: 2010 

• Where I bought this book: I really do not remember 

• Why I bought this book: I buy every King book as it comes out.

********

    So. I was browsing in my local Barnes & Noble store this past week, and stopped by the horror section to see if they had a copy of A Face in the Crowd, a digital book he wrote a while back with Stewart O'Nan. 

    Instead, I came across a copy of 1922, a thin volume about a farmer who conspired to kill his wife in that year. I looked through it and did not recognize the synopsis. Looking further, I noticed it was originally published in 2010 with three other tales in the Full Dark, No Stars collection. I knew I had that copy at home.

    So I grabbed it and started reading the first story, 1922. Still did not recognize it. But I liked it, though it was a bit creepy. The second story, Big Driver, about a serial rapist, I also did not find familiar.

    Still, I was sure I had read this collection before, even if it was more than 15 years ago.

    But apparently, I had not. The next two stories, Fair Extension and A Good Marriage, also seemed new to me.

    I could have forgotten all of them, although I have often caught glimpses of King's past writing in his new works, But in these, nothing. So maybe I had bought the book and put it aside, then on the shelf, without even reading it. But my Goodreads page shows I read it from Nov. 25, 2010 -- Thanksgiving Day! -- to Nov. 27, 2010, about three weeks after it came out. So maybe I lied, or maybe I've read so much King my hippocampus cannot keep them all sorted out.

    *Shrug* I suppose I'll never knew.

    But I'm glad I have now read it (or read it again). The stories were good, if a bit unsettling, even for King.

Book Review: Cursed Bunny

 By Bora Chung

• Translated by: Anton Hur

• Pub Date: 2017 in Korean; 2021 in English

• Where I bought this book: Downbound Books, Cincinnati, Ohio  

• Why I bought this book: The bunny on the cover told me to, and that it was shortlisted for an International Book Prize

******

    

    Short stories are not just truncated novels but have a flow and a texture all their own.

    In the hands of Chung, short stories take on the aura of fables, using allegories that shock and horrify, and rise to the status of a legend devolving into fantasy.

    She writes about absurd ghosts and lives lived brutally, about children and capitalism, and about war, peace, and the aftermath -- which brings us back to those spirits that can haunt us. 

    These tales are seemingly simple, told with little fuss and a minimalist style. They have few characters, none more than needed, and often are nameless, with only enough detail to tell the tale without shame or scorn. 

    But, oh, do they hold power over your mind and thoughts. There's also some nods to the misogyny rampant in the culture, and a feminist take. In The Embodiment, an unmarried, pregnant woman is told -- by her doctor, no less -- to get a father or the child will not grow properly. The woman responds by going out on seon dates set up by a matchmaker for the specific purpose of finding a man to marry her. 

    The opening tale, The Head, begins with a woman seeing a head rising from her toilet, calling out for "mother." It is created from her excretions. The title story, which reads like an old fashioned fairy tale, is about a man who creates "cursed fetishes" -- in this case a lamp shaped like a bunny. A second, similarly told story, Scars, is about a man who finds riches in the most evil places.

    The stories are tough to read, and reach into places that most would rather avoid. But Chung's style belies their nature -- her basic, matter-of-fact narratives let the tales stand as the epitome of how to write a short story.

TWIB: 13th Ed.

     So, I visited the Book Loft in Columbus today -- and while the two-hour drive took closer to four hours because of a massive delay on Interstate 71 (I have no idea why; traffic just stopped for an hour) -- it was an enjoyable experience. A late lunch with my daughter at Fourth & State, a vegan cafe downtown, and then on to add to The TBR Stack.

The latest haul, ready to be read

    

        The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks-Dalton: I have no idea what it's about, but my first daughter told me to "but it and read it next." Also, the title is fantastic, and the author's first book, Good Morning, Midnight, was a good read (and another compelling title).

    Babel, by R.F. Kuang: I have seen this title all over the place. So I grabbed it in the store, and after reading the description -- about languages, learning, and imperialism -- I could not put it back.

    How It Went, by Wendell Berry: When Kentucky's greatest living author -- and perhaps its finest living person -- puts out a new volume of stories about Port William, Ky., you just have to give it a go. Berry, after all, taught this Kentucky immigrant everything I've learned about the state.

    The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris: What it's like when two Black woman work in the same office, as told by a Black woman. I think I'll learn something from this.

    Tread of Angels, by Rebecca Roanhorse: Read this description from the book flap: "High in the remote mountains, the town of Goetia is booming as prospectors from near and far come to mine the powerful new element Divinity. Divinity  is the remains of the body of the rebel Abaddon, who fell to Earth during Heaven's War, and it powers the world's most inventive and innovative technologies, ushering in a new age of progress. However, only the descendants of those who rebelled, called the Fallen, possess the ability to see the rich lodes of the precious element. That makes them a necessary evil among the good and righteous people called the Elect, and Goetia a town segregated by ancestry and class."  Yep, me too.

    Galatea, by Madeline Miller: It's short, but it's the first book in a while from Miller, the goddess of reinterpreting the perspectives of the Greek legends.

Book Review: Learning to Talk

 

•  Authors: Hilary Mantel

• Where I bought this book: Arcadia Books, Spring Green, Wisc. 

• Why I bought this book: Her other collection was titled and included the story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

*******

    

    The settings in these short stories, mostly about childhood, are benign; the colors are grey; the tales are ordinary.

    But the writing is crisp. It shows off the literary style of one of the  best writers of our time. It has touches of that droll British wit. It is written mostly in the first person, and thus brings us closer to the author and the subjects.

    Indeed, the collection is pure British. Its tone, its inflections and its manner says, quite politely yet determinately, that this is a British book of British stories.

    None of that is surprising. Its author is one of the finest writers in Britain today. Mantel is a two-time winner of the Booker Prize, and her latest book -- the finale in her trilogy of the years of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII -- was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. 

   This is one of her earlier books, published in 2003, and her first of just two collections of short stories.

    Many of the stories appear to be almost autobiographical, and that is not an accident. In her forward, Mantel says the tales are part of her life, but are not her real life.

I would not describe these stories as autobiographical, more as autoscopic. From a distant, elevated perspective, my writing self is looking down at a body reduced to a shell, waiting to be fleshed out by phrases.

    Among my favorite tales is King Billy is a Gentleman, in which a Catholic lodger replaces the father in a household, and the tale explores some of the sectarianism in British life. The Clean Slate shows the failures of the perspectives of the past to tell a true story. It contains the great line about a couple of Irish uncles: "They drank when they had money, and prayed when they had none."

    Third Floor Rising, about a mother who gains confidence when she goes to work in a Manchester department store, and her daughter, who does not, has the stock on the floor as major characters.

Book Review: Alternative Ulster Noir

 

•  Authors: Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville, Sharon Dempsey, Gerard Brennan, Kelly Creighton, James Murphy, and Simon Maltman

• Where I bought this book: bookshop.org (Check it out; it's like a local bookstore online.)

• Why I bought this book: It had a story by Colin Bateman, one of my favorite NI writers 

*******

    One of the difficulties of reading a short story collection by different writers is trying to get into their individual heads and attune yourself to their separate styles.

    This is particularly true when you're unfamiliar with most of the writers, and while the settings have a vague familiarity, it's not like they are outside your front door. But the idea of stories inspired by or based on songs is quite original, so you're willing to give it a shot.

    Which is a good choice.

__________________________________________________________________

Hot tip: Listen to the songs first -- they are all online. It'll get you in the mood.

 Hot tip #2: Listen again after you've read the stories. It'll give a new perspective.

__________________________________________________________________

    With that said, let me tell you: This tiny little volume (120 pages) full of short (10-15 pages each) stories is well worth your time. It's unique, contains lots of weird stuff, and is chock-a-block full of original writing and dark interpretations from a merry band of writers from Northern Ireland.

    The stories are set in Northern Ireland, and tell of crimes and other dastardly deeds, some in or around Belfast, and they may or may not have secular connotations. They are also based, some more and some less, on songs by Northern Ireland-based artists.

    For instance, James Murphy's contribution takes the title of the song How to Be Dead by the band Snow Patrol and turns into a chilling suggestion of the nature of a witness protection program. 

    My favorite story, Black Dog Sin, by Gerard Brennan, starts with a man in the throes of a grief-and-alcohol-fueled binge, and ends with a strange, dark and cynical twist. It closely follows the song by Joshua Burnside, but then takes a warped turn.

    And the penultimate story, by Simon Maltman, who also edited the collection, tells a darkly humorous tale about a serial killer who tags along on a tour -- of which Maltman is the illustrious guide -- of Northern Ireland's noir haunts in Belfast. Based on Trigger Inside, by the punk band Therapy?, it literally takes a line from the song to give insight into the killer's mind. 

Book Review

That Old Country Music, by Kevin Barry

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio
• Why I bought this book: Kevin Barry may be Ireland's best current writer

**********

   

    To get a sense of Kevin Barry's Ireland, read two successive stories in this collection -- Who's-Dead McCarthy, and Roma Kid.

    The first revolves around death and is light and funny. The second is about life but is sad and melancholy. Both, however, are classic illustrations of the art of writing a short story, and quintessential examples of Barry's exquisite work.

    In his latest collection, Barry gifts us 11 tales of Irish life by featuring the character at the center of the story. The title story, for instance, is told through the thoughts of a 17-year-old pregnant girl as she awaits in a decrepit van -- and "clawed at the greasy vinyl of the seat" -- for her older finance to return from robbing a local gas station. "It was the second Monday of May. She was little more than four months pregnant. ... (He) was 32 years old and it was not long at all since he had been her mother's finance." 

    You can learn a lot about someone in 14 pages.

    Barry is in a class by himself in the present age. Within Ireland's history of world-class writers -- James Joyce, Anne Enright, Oscar Wilde, Maeve Binchey, William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, among others -- Barry has written himself into the pantheon.

    In stories that are less than 20 pages, Barry introduces, presents, and concludes the essence of a life amid hard times. In Who's-Dead McCarthy, an old man who has a preoccupation with death sets himself up as a town crier to inform his small town who has passed on -- with wit, charm, and tears. 

You'd see him coming on O'Connell Street -- the hanging jaws, the woeful trudge, the load. You'd cross the road to avoid him but he'd have spotted you, and he would draw you into him. 

    In Roma Kid, a young immigrant girl leaves her family in despair and travels the country looking for food and a new life.

Her mother had told her nothing but the girl knew that soon the family would be sent home again and she would not go back there. She was nine years old and chose for her leaving the red pattern dress and zipped her anorak over it.

    Both are narratives and character sketches, tightly and extraordinarily written, that leave you laughing our loud and crying in hope and despair. You intimately know these people, their dreams, their desires and their fears.

    In most of the writings here, the actual story is limited or is pointless. What is important is Barry's style, his descriptions, and his characters. His words are meticulously chosen, sculptured with care, and with preternatural sense. He shows a variety of voices, yet his characters are familiar as a favored aunt or hated uncle.

    Read this book. Savor it. Re-read it again and again and discover anew the sheer pleasure of great writing.

Book Review: Kissing the Witch

Kissing the Witch, by Emma Donoghue

    The best way to read this book is to forget your previous images of fairy tales, and with the author's help, let your imagination run wild.

    Donoghue's rewritten fairy tales are extraodinary. She ties them together with wee little blurbs at the end of each story and the beginning of the next. She twists them a bit to give them a sense of freshness.

    I suspect many people's knowledge of fairy tales comes not from reading the originals, but from watching Disney movies or other cartoon animations. Such treatment often infantalizes the stories to simple tropes. Donoghue returns then to their truer nature -- part of a mythology that tries to explain the world and why things happen or may go wrong.

    The writing here is superb. The characters are new but familiar, often redrawn to fit Donoghue's feminine perspective. The stories are written in keeping with the old style, She uses her love and understanding of language to invigorate each tale, and weaves them to create a loosely tied longer tale.  

    As someone who is not an expert on fairy tales, I am unsure if these are rewrites of older tales, brand new legends, or both. Some seemed familiar, while others did not.

    All but one were absolutely wonderful.

    I could not get through The Tale of the Cottage, which was written as by one with subpar language skills -- perhaps an animal? -- but in a collection of 13 stories, one miss is allowed.

    To make up for it, there was Tale of the Voice, about an introverted woman the community sees as a witch. She is not. Instead, she observes and advises. She doesn't cause the curses people suffer through as the price they pay for their desires, but rather she understands and informs them what would be the consequences of their actions. It's a subtle but too often ignored distinction.

Book Review: Flight or Fright

Flight or Fright, edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent

    In 1963, the Twilight Zone aired an episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which an airplane passenger, played by William Shatner, saw a gremlin tearing off part of the wing. Some 20 years later,  Twilight Zone: The Movie remade the episode, this time starring John Lithgow as the passenger.

    Flash forward to TV 16 years later, when Lithgow was starring in "Third Rock From the Sun," a show about an alien visiting earth. In one episode, his boss, The Big Giant Head, played by Shatner, came to visit, thus rendering one of the best inside jokes ever on the networks.

    The Big Giant Head was asked how his trip went. His response: "Horrifying at first. I looked out the window and I saw something on the side of the plane." To which Lithgow's character responded in horror, "The same thing happened to me!"

    You can read that original story, first published in 1961 by Richard Matheson, in this uneven anthology of airplane horror stories. It ranges from a brief 19th Century story by Ambrose Bierce, to a tale of envisioned "Air Jungles" above 30,000 feet written in 1913 by Sir Arther Conan Doyle (yes, the Sherlock Holmes writer) to a 2018 tale of being on an airplane when the world ends, by Joe Hill.

    I know many people dislike short stories, but I think they hold a place of honor. A good one is hard to write -- with a few words and fewer character, a writer must tell a tale with a grab-you-by-the-neck beginning, a now-sit-there-and-listen middle, and a see-I-told-you ending. This book has some of those, but a fair amount of WTF stories that leave you empty, and a couple of tales that never get off the ground.

    There are some out-and-out horror tales, some that are more wild imaginings, and a couple of hang-on-for-dear-life adventures. One of the best is a simple detective story, with an opening that pulls you in, a middle that keeps you wondering, and an ending that is satisfying and believable. It doesn't lead you around in circles, but tell the story and gets to the point like a good short story should.

    As an added bonus, you get to read a new tale by Stephen King, a good one that reaches into the supernatural heights, but makes you wonder just how much of what he writes is true.

Book Review: If it Bleeds

 If It Bleeds, by Stephen King

    OK. This is a Stephen King book. So you know it's going to have good writting, lively characters with distinct personalities, and a story that moves along in time and space.

    This collection of four novellas is all of that. Except for the stories. They are predictable, well-worn tales. Ideas that King dusted off and liked, possibly thinking they were good enough the first time around, so why not use them again. 

    I couldn't find a single plot device in this grouping that isn't a King trope.

    He's explored a tender relationship between a teenager and an older person. He's examined a writer who is haunted by his characters and his work. He's done apocalyptic events, using them for many purposes, including making it a simple tale about the end of the world. Almost all of his tales about children and teenagers show their being bullied or the bullies. In King's work, children's memories always come back to haunt them. And to top it off, he has to bring back a popular character to relive her torment.

    Really, Constant Writer, what should we Constant Readers have expected to happen when you put a cell phone in someone's coffin? Isn't that a bit mundane? Something that, perhaps, a lesser writer and storyteller would have come up with? When putting that one down on paper, and editing your work, did you really sit back, reflect on the idea, and think, "Awesome! Wow!"?

    Clearly, this is not King's best, most original work. 

    But despite all that, I enjoyed the collection. It was a quick read. If it isn't King's best work, it certainly isn't his worst. The characters are memorable, and for the most part, they are good, honest, salt-of-the-earth Yankees. The writing is compelling. It moves along.

    But Constant Writer has done a lot better.

Book Review: Full Throttle

Full Trottle, by Joe Hill

Let me start by saying the introduction to the book, in which Hill talks about having a famous father, is wonderful. Also, I liked two of the stories -- Late Returns, and You Are Released. The former is based on the idea of not wanting to die in the middle of reading a book, and involves a curious display of time travel. The latter is set on an airplane when a nuclear war breaks out. It's told from the variety of perspectives of the people on the plane, and it works well.

The rest, well -- let's just say they are the bad and the ugly of Sergio Leone's trilogy.

Usually, I enjoy Hill's writing, especially his  novels. A couple of tales in this short story collection might have been better had they been given more room to grow. And the title story, which he wrote with his father, Stephen King, has been published before.

Some of the others, though, are bad. Meandering, pointless, and, quite frankly, boring.

Take By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain, for instance. It's a tale about two children finding a dinosaur body along the waters of the lake between Vermont and New York, which takes on the legend of Champy, the lake's resident "monster." But the tale is dull, and it focuses more on the children and their siblings arguing with each other. The ending is confusing.

In the Tall Grass, which also credits King as a co-author, seems to be little more than a grotesque version of King's 1977 short story, Children of the Corn. Thumbprint had some interesting characters, but a weak story to bring them together. Mums, about a fanatical right-wing family and their son, is  more a rant against the alt-right movement to overthrow the government than anything else.

 The Devil on the Staircase pages

I liked that Hill took liberties with style and structure in two stories. One, The Devil on the Staircase, was written in a typography that resembles flights of stairs. A second, Twittering From the Circus of the Dead, is what the story implies -- a young girl's tweets from a mysterious circus in a small, isolated town. In both cases, the experimental typography and format worked better than the story.

Book Review: Day of the Locust

The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West

This short novel, written in 1939, portrays Hollywood as it was seen at the time -- insular, bigoted, contrived, full of ego and fury. Which, likewise, is pretty much how it is seen now.

The book was made into an Oscar-nominated film in 1975, long after its author was dead. Since then, it's been pretty much forgotten, but a friend and movie buff recommended I read it. It seemed like a short and easy read, so I did.

Short it was; easy not so much. Its writing is good -- tight but descriptive. But its story is meandering and vague, and sometimes seems like a series of random vignettes. More than halfway through, I wondered where the tale was going, and whether it had a point.

In the end, it got someplace with a vengence. And, oh my, it certainly has a point. It wasn't pretty, but is was a conclusion.

The tale centers around Tod Hackett, an artist and designer who moves to California with a goal of striking it big in the movie industry. There, he meets a series of chracters, each who seems to personify a Hollwood character, a stereotype, perhaps even a trope. There's the savage and angry midget, the starlet whom everyone lusts after, the losers, and the clowns. Tod is the guy who wants to be part of the surreal scene, and fit in with the Hollywood upper crust. 

Did I say surreal? Listen to a part of the description as Tod wanders around a Hollywood lot, looking for some of his friends: 

"He left the road and climbed across the spine of the hill to look down on the other side. From there he could see a ten-acre field of cockleburrs spouted with clumps of sunflowers and wild gum. In the center of the field was a gigantic pile of sets, flats, and props, While he watched, a ten-ton truck added another load to it. ... When he saw a red glare in the sky and heard the rumble of cannon, he knew it must be Waterloo. From around a bend in the road trotted several cavalry regiments. They wore capes and chest armor of black cardbord and carried long horse pistols in their saddle holsters."

Then there is Homer Simpson, who represents us -- the smiling yet vacant fan, who knows he will never be part of  the elite, but is content to linger around the edges and be exploited. Listen to how Tod describes him: "(Homer) was grateful and increased his smile. Tod couldn't help seeing all its annoying attributes, resignation, kindliness, and humility."

Book Review: Going the Distance

Going the Distance: The Life and Works of W.P. Kinsella, by William Steele

Kinsella's life was successful, yet uneven. The same can be said for this biography.

For starters, it was filled with too much minutia. I do not need to know about every date Kinsella went on in high school, nor every address where he lived.

Instead, I would have liked more information about the reviews and responses to Kinsella's works, especially the debate about the fiction he wrote in the voice of indigenous people. The view that Kinsella was guilty of cultural appropriation grew throughout his life -- particularly as he became more popular for his other works -- but was treated as an afterthought in the book, spread out amidst the pages, rather than as an idea that should have been evaluated as a specific criticism of a portion of his work.

Perhaps the structure of the biography dictated how it was handled. Instead of categorical breakdown, it was written in a strict chronological order.

Still, the book presented a wealth of information about Kinsella's life and writings. He set his goal on being a writer at an early age, and despite feeling hampered and discouraged throughout those early years, made good on his goal. The book also showed how incidents in Kinsella's upbringing on an isolated farm outside of Edmonton, Canada, affected his prose. He used other experiences in his life in his stories and novels, but denied his works were biographical. Again, this issue could have been explored in a chapter, instead of interspersed in the book.

Kinsella, who died of assisted suicide in 2016, also had a disjointed private life. He hated most of his early government jobs, because he hated government and bureaucracy. He became a university professor for a span, but for the most part, he hated teaching. He hated all forms of religion, but his description of religious people could mirror a description of himself.

"... (T)here is a smugness about every one of them, a condescending sense of superiority, which the more they try to hide it, the more it shows."

The book is at its best when it explores Kinsella's growth as a writer. That may be because the growth went along Kinsella's timeline -- for the most part, he got better as he grew older and more experienced.

He was a prolific writer, often having five or more stories and books in process. He often would expand his short stories into novels -- a criticism by people who thought he was unduly padding out his stories -- but one that I would argue produced some of his best work. Shoeless Joe, for instance, started out as a short short, then a novel, and later became the movie Field of Dreams.

Steele spends a lot of time describing how the book traveled its path and grew into a cultural touchstone. He also discussed the impact it had on Kinsella and his life as a writer.

Kinsella's death in 2016 came as a shock, but his health had long been poor, and he went out as he wanted. He spurned life-extending measures that would have caused much pain and suffering, and choose to end his own life.