In the Valley of the Kings

Starred review from July 20, 2009
In this haunting collection, Holt's lush language pulls literary treasures out of dark places, bringing readers ice from the rings of Saturn “where seeing and vanishing are one,” a cartouche from deep within an ancient tomb and the late-night conversations of a married couple awaiting the end of the world. Magical realism tinges the grim “My Father's Heart,” about a man who keeps his father's heart in a jar on his mantelpiece, and “Scylla,” in which a captain returns from sea to find his home altered by an inexplicable force. An ominous future is the backdrop of “Eurydike,” in which an amnesiac wakes up in a place full of empty beds and incomprehensible clocks. “Aurora” follows the heartbreaking thoughts of a spaceship doomed to harvest ice. A tantalizing puzzle takes root in one story (its title is Greek) as a lonely survivor investigates the cause of a disease that marks its victims with a single word repeated over and over beneath the skin. This collection, with its allusions to mythology and tragic conundrums, demands intelligence and rewards the reader with Borgesian riches.

August 1, 2009
Arthur C. Clarke meets Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka in these dark, dense stories.

Holt is a crafter of words as well as a believer in the magical potency of The Word, for many of his stories have as their theme the power of a single word. In"? ????s," for example, a five-year-old girl is brought to an emergency room with bruises on her hands, cheeks, forehead and arms, bruises that form a mysterious word she utters just before she dies. The physical transference of this word (also in bruises) to others forms first an epidemic and then a plague. In"My Father's Heart," the nameless narrator literally keeps his father's heart in a glass jar, but by allegorical extension this artifact becomes an image of his love, guilt and pain. The chilling"Charybdis" introduces us to a mission to Jupiter gone awry. Two of the three astronauts on board go insane and leave the ship, with predictably fatal results, while the third, the narrator, has harrowing conversations with mission control that make it clear he is also struggling with issues of psychological autonomy. The title piece is more of a novella than a short story. Here a scholar of Egyptian antiquities has participated in uncovering the tomb of Nur-Mar, but he has also contracted a fatal disease borne by an unknown pathogen. His quest is to discover the meaning of a cryptic papyrus he has stolen from the tomb, a papyrus that he hopes will lead him to a mysterious"'word of hidden meaning.'" The"dangerous madness" he attributes to the silence of Nur-Mar's dynasty mirrors his own obsession and paranoia.

Stories for those who wish to enter enigmatic and uncomfortable spaces.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from September 1, 2009
In his debut collection, practicing physician Holt takes on the big cosmological questions in stunning fashion, recalling writers like Conrad, Hawthorne, and Melville in the scope of his interests and the grandeur of his style. His characters, like the astronaut in "Charybdis" (an O. Henry award winner from 1982, first published in the "Kenyon Review") and the archaeologist in the title novella, stand on the precipice of the unknown, whether the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, or the contents of an Egyptian tomb. Not surprisingly, "Charybdis" has its counterpart in a story called "Scylla," in which a ship's captain and crew are faced with an amorphous danger called "the Law" that keeps them from venturing out again once they've come back to port. Here, Odysseus meets Bartleby the Scrivener, and domesticity brings its own rewards. VERDICT This collection represents a life's work of stories that are not well known outside of the readership of literary journals. That's about to change, and it's a good thing.Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

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