Winter 2007 (21 page)

When Arlie contracts
cancer, her children are left to grow up with their dad while living in the
glass slipper. John, of course, gets remarried to Cynthia, the woman he really
loves. They have a child together, a daughter named Lisa. And Arlie’s children
grow hateful, developing problems (drug addiction, social withdrawal) of their
own. Arlies ghost oversees it all, occasionally appearing to John and
eventually leading a young woman to her old home in order to help heal the
families wounds.

A glass slipper, a mean
step mother, a family living in a shoe — Hoffman whips out all sorts of
fairy-tale tropes in Skylight Confessions — what’s more, she puts them to
good use. Her characters — even those with last names like Moody —
have plenty of depth and complexity, and the underlying theme of how love,
destiny and genetics have powerful holds on our lives rings true. Yes, Hoffman
pushes emotional buttons — just as the fairy-tales she’s so fond of often
do; but she manages to put such an original spin on these timeless tropes, that
she comes off as one of the premiere fantasists of her generation.

 
.

Hart & Boot & Other Stories

By Tim Pratt (Night Shade
Books/209 pages/$14.95)
Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

One doesn’t a lowly
reviewer such as yours truly to point out that Michael Chabon made a fine
choice in selecting the title story of this sophomore short story collection by
up and comer Tim Pratt for
The Best American Short Stories 2005
. Anyone
who read his first novel,
The Strange Adventures of Ranger Girl
, knows
Pratt’s got it goin’ on: weirdness, idiosyncratic characters, good plot. All of
that and more is working overtime for Pratt in
Hart & Boot and Other
Stories
.

If there’s an over-riding
theme in this collection, it would be love: sometimes it’s love for a friend,
sometimes it’s unrequited love, sometimes it’s the rare, white-hot passion one
is lucky to run across once or twice in a lifetime, and sometimes it’s a love
for life. Since it takes on the old West, “Hart & Boot,” the title story of
this collection, is fittingly spare in style and structure. Using the real life
lady bandit Pearl Hart and a mysterious partner she teamed up with for a short
time as his starting place, Pratt sets about the task of creating a fictional
biography. In this case, Pearl has managed to create John (or Joe) Boot out of
whole cloth, via the power of her imagination and the longing and desire for a
good man, the sort of lover who knows what’s most important. Pratt is savvy
enough not to turn the story into a “happily ever-after” type tale, leaving off
with an appropriately mysterious and satisfying, but open-ended, denouement.

Like the client for whom he
currently works — an immortal whose “life” (which was hidden inside a
stone) has been stolen — the assassin named Zealand in “Life In Stone”
has grown bitter. But whether or not he’s grown bitter enough to give up on
life is a question he must answer for himself during his hunt for the client’s
soul in North America, a search that takes him to some fantastic homes and
hideaways, such as the bottom of Lake Champlain or a secret spot behind Niagara
Falls. Zealand’s body aches with pains and injuries earned throughout his
career, and his payment for locating the client’s soul is the secret of
immortality. But when he comes across the client’s daughter — all but
forgotten, due to a sad side-effect of living so long — Zealand finds
himself questioning his methods and his own inner madness.

Lying at the um, heart, of
this collection of fantastic tales is “Romanticore,” a story of a fiery
passionate love that must, of needs, be short-lived. The protagonist, Ray, a
writer, is a man living in an open relationship. This reflects his beliefs
about the nature of man-woman relations in general: that they shouldn’t be
physically constricting, as long as both parties are honest about their
dalliances. Then he’s jilted by his lover after she falls in love with his best
friend, whom she has been seeing on the sly. Beating his chest, howling at the
sky, and generally feeling sorry for himself (as we all do), said protagonist
stumbles into Lily, a hot, artsy-fartsy musician whose open relationship with
Martin (also a musician) allows her to dabble while he is touring. They have
five months together. Of course, that isn’t enough for Ray. For him, Lilly is
the end-all and be-all: a goddess in more ways than one. His obsession and the
strange-goings on in the relationship between Martin and Lily make for a truly
killer ending. For my money, it’s one of the better fantasies about the search
for love, right up there with Harlan Ellison’s “Grail.”

“Lachrymose and the Golden
Egg,” is a romantic comedy with plenty of pathos in which reality and fantasy
start to change places via the magic of modern medicine and desire; and “Living
with the Harpy” is a bittersweet tale of true love realized, but at a cost.
There are eight other stories in this excellent collection by Pratt, and every
one of them is a solid piece of work. Whether he is reinventing old myths or
creating new ones, Pratt is a formidable writer, one whose books deserve a
place on everyone’s bookshelves.

 
.

Heart Shaped Box

By Joe Hill (Morrow/384
pages/ $24.95)
Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

Genre fans familiar with
the best in the field already of horror and dark fantasy know the name Joe
Hill, because it is attached to some of the better short stories published in
the recent past. World Fantasy, British Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards have been
handed out to Hill for stories like “Voluntary Committal” and “Best New
Horror.” Hill’s first novel,
Heart-Shaped Box
, is an unsettling ghost
story that takes what could be a laughable premise and adds so many twists,
turns and out-right shocks that readers will be white-knuckling their armchairs
by novel’s end.

A self-indulgent,
self-important member of the Baby Boomer generation, Judas Coyne is a
middle-aged survivor of rock stardom, who still makes money off his past fame
(think of Ozzy Ozbourne and his reality-based TV show and you’ll be in the
ballpark). He’s also an insatiable collector of morbid artifacts: a painting by
serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Aliester Crowley’s chessboard, the 300-year-old
signed confession of a witch, and so on. And when Jude’s assistant, Danny, runs
across a ghost for sale, he can’t help himself – he has to buy it.

“It” is an old suit that
the seller says is haunted. At first, Jude believes he’s participating in a
lark. But on the first night after the suit arrives at his house, Jude sees the
ghost of an old man swinging a pendulum-like blade while sitting in chair. Not
long after, his lover, Georgia, sees the ghost as well. Although strange but
harmless things start happening around their house, it doesn’t take long for Jude
and Georgia to become certain that the old man’s ghost means to do them harm.
Especially when they discover that the accidental discovery of the internet
ghost was actually a setup: a woman seeking revenge (for a sister who committed
suicide over the aging rocker) made sure Judas would fall for the bait and buy
the ghost of one Craddock McDermott.

Suffice it to say that the
truth is even more complicated. At that point, the book moves from the tale of
an unsettling, eerie haunting to suspense-filled thriller as Jude and Georgia
take it on the road in order to solve the mystery and set things right. But
even then, the weird supernatural element prevails, as in this passage from
chapter twenty-one: “The daylight began to fail when they were just north of Fredericksburg,
and that was when Jude saw the dead man’s pickup behind them…”

This debut novel is a fine mix of
psychological terror and gruesome horror. Influences from a diverse array of
writers — Edgar Allen Poe, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman and even Hill’s
paterfamilias — are apparent while reading this heart-stopping horror
novel. But in the end, it is Joe Hill’s own writerly strengths and voice that
shine through; Hill’s undeniably singular talent is unmistakable. As for
Heart-Shaped
Box
, it’s the perfect Valentine for the fan of good horror fiction in
anyone’s circle of friends, family or lovers.

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