The Pier Falls

March 7, 2016
Haddon’s (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) collection of nine short stories is a mélange of acutely observed domestic dramas and bizarre tales of life in outer space, ancient Greece, and a trip to a remote corner of the globe to retrieve a lost explorer. Highlights include “Bunny,” which recounts the story of a 27-year-old man who weighs 518 lbs. due to his addiction to junk food; “Breathe,” the story of a woman who returns to England from her expatriate life in California to face the relics of her desiccated family; and “Wodwo,” which combines family holiday-time melodrama with the appearance of a strange man who may be a character straight out of British folklore. “The Island,” about a princess who finds herself left on an island, and the titular “The Pier Falls,” which calmly recounts a seaside disaster, are quietly unrelenting in their descriptions of horror. Subtle strands often serve to connect the stories to one another, whether it’s a problematic mother or the smell of ammonia on someone’s dying breath. Though each story is beautifully written, Haddon is at his best when capturing the peculiarly dark, British mirth that accompanies disaster. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates.

March 1, 2016
Time and connection are recurring themes in this story collection from the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003, etc.). Since he made his debut with the popular Curious Incident, a murder mystery of sorts with an autistic young man as protagonist, Haddon has committed himself to a singularly twisted literary progression. Each book finds the British writer in a different place than the previous one had suggested, over a career that has encompassed children's books and poetry as well as scripts for radio and television. Thus, it's no surprise that his first story collection is all over the map in both form and quality. The two opening stories are among the best, with neither "The Pier Falls" nor "The Island" having anything as conventional as a named character. The former provides a tick-tock account of a tragedy, as the casualties accumulate and two survivors forge an unlikely connection, and then shifts into a longer-term perspective on the aftereffects. The latter is one of the stories in the collection where dreams blur with fairy tales, as a princess is abducted and abandoned by a man she assumes is her betrothed. "She realised that there were many worlds beyond this world and that her own was very small indeed," he writes in a reflection that could apply to other stories as well. Yet some of the others are both more conventional and more contrived, as "Bunny" features another unlikely connection between a recluse and a woman who had been abused by her parents, "Wodwo" finds a holiday family dinner with predictable tensions interrupted by an unexpected stranger with surprising consequences, and the closing "The Weir" finds two other strangers coming together in unlikely circumstances and forging a bond, as "change gets harder," with "the world shifting too fast in ways he doesn't understand." Haddon deserves credit for taking chances even if not all of them pay off.

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March 15, 2016
With the same sense of compassion and artistic dexterity that earned him a following with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and The Red House (2012), Haddon presents nine widely varying tales. Set in the Victorian era and the future, in commonplace and supernatural worlds, the stories are united by a cast of dispossessed characters plagued by violence or despair. The collection is best characterized by its opener, an unnerving narrative about a seaside pier's collapse, which bonds victims through horror and hope. A team of Martian settlers encounters a series of strange events after one member must perform surgery on the surgeon. A morbidly obese outcast snubs his controlling mother by befriending a former schoolmate. Gathering for holiday festivities amid a treacherous winter storm, an affluent family receives a shadowy guest who turns merriment into nightmare. A princess is stranded on a remote island after running off with a former prisoner. As funny as they are dire, Haddon's entertaining stories are reminders that tragedy is inevitable, but that we thrive in spite of it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

Starred review from March 15, 2016

If your jaw dropped when you read Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, it will drop again when you pick up this exemplary collection, whose stories of uncommon situations clarify that each of us is eventually put on the edge. The meticulously described collapse of a pier in a faded coastal town, one woman's moral choice while trapped at a seemingly abandoned space station on Mars, an adventurer's final letter as he lies dying in the jungle--all show how, as much as we'd like to sink into the predictable, we face jolts and forking roads that bring out our best or worst, often revealing, as one narrator says, "those disabilities which become skills in the right context." Even a more routine episode, such as a prodigal daughter's sudden, desperate effort to help the mother she's discovered living in filth, yields an eerie understanding of how we can go off the tracks. The author's portrait of a stranger's intervention during a recognizably uncomfortable Christmas dinner is a masterpiece of family friction and one character's easy fall from top dog to barrel's bottom. VERDICT In pristinely detailed prose, Haddon shocks us with the strong sense of our humanity. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/2/15.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2015

The author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time goes darker and more dangerous with this collection of short stories, six of which have never before been published. Those already out there have appeared in big-name venues; for instance, lucky readers of Granta have already seen "The Gun," which won the O'Henry Prize.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2016

If your jaw dropped when you read Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, it will drop again when you pick up this exemplary collection, whose stories of uncommon situations clarify that each of us is eventually put on the edge. The meticulously described collapse of a pier in a faded coastal town, one woman's moral choice while trapped at a seemingly abandoned space station on Mars, an adventurer's final letter as he lies dying in the jungle--all show how, as much as we'd like to sink into the predictable, we face jolts and forking roads that bring out our best or worst, often revealing, as one narrator says, "those disabilities which become skills in the right context." Even a more routine episode, such as a prodigal daughter's sudden, desperate effort to help the mother she's discovered living in filth, yields an eerie understanding of how we can go off the tracks. The author's portrait of a stranger's intervention during a recognizably uncomfortable Christmas dinner is a masterpiece of family friction and one character's easy fall from top dog to barrel's bottom. VERDICT In pristinely detailed prose, Haddon shocks us with the strong sense of our humanity. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/2/15.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.