Last Day on Earth
Stories
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- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
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نقد و بررسی
December 12, 2016
Ray Bradbury meets Tom Perrotta in the new collection by Puchner (Model Home), which blends science fiction with the all-too-real suburban horrors of deadbeat dads, unsupervised teens, and the onset of mental illness. In the instant classic “Beautiful Monsters,” a brother and sister rearing themselves in a world where parents are extinct encounter their first adult. Hints of fantasy turn out to be something more nefarious in pieces such as “Mothership,” in which a troubled woman finds her identity inexplicably fusing with her sister’s when she takes her own niece and nephew trick-or-treating; “Right This Instant,” in which an emotionally fragile boy becomes convinced his mother is a robot; and “Expression,” in which a precocious wannabe writer learns a lesson from the prowler stalking his arts camp. Then there are the bleakest stories, including “Heavenland,” in which a young father attending a coke party refuses to let his infant ruin his fun, and the title story, in which a harried single mom gives her son’s German shorthairs a 48-hour ultimatum. Other tales feature aging punk rockers, vindictive divorcées, and ready-to-snap bookstore employees, completing Puchner’s composite of everyday desperation. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME Entertainment.
Starred review from December 15, 2016
The nine stories in this collection by Puchner (Model Home, 2010, etc.) range from the domestic to the surreal. Even the most seemingly realistic of them, however, hint at cracks under the surface of normal life in the suburban United States. Puchner often casts an eye on the sheer strangeness of aging, whether it's during the sudden onslaught of puberty or the slow decline from middle age onward. "Right This Instant" compresses all the agonies of adolescence into a single turning point, as confused Josh--missing his father, hating the guy who has replaced him, and newly introduced to a potent strain of marijuana by an older kid down the street--suddenly convinces himself that his mom is a robot. The oddest, and possibly the strongest, story in the volume takes this theme to its logical extreme. In "Beautiful Monsters," a boy and a girl, both "Perennials" whose aging has been delayed indefinitely at a pre-pubescent stage, are appalled and fascinated to encounter a "Senescent," a grown man with a "strange hairy body and giant shoulders tucked in like a vulture's." The collection sometimes suffers from repetition of plots: an odd number of the stories, for example, hinge on crises that result when a caregiver puts a young child in radical danger. But they're intriguingly varied in terms of characters and setting and particularly in tone. Puchner can be wildly funny, as in "Trojan Whores Hate You Back," a mordant tale of a would-be comeback tour by a punk band whose members now use hemorrhoid pillows and wear windbreakers and blue linen shorts. Or oddly touching, as in "Mothership," in which a self-involved young woman recently released from drug treatment takes her niece and nephew trick-or-treating, to mixed results. Without fundamentally challenging the traditional short story structure, the author finds a way to bend it to suit a skewed and fantastic vision of the world.
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September 15, 2016
A boy fears that his mother is a robot, while a psychotic aunt takes her niece and nephew trick-or-treating. Puchner again portrays contemporary life's dark and troubling absurdity, for which he's already won a Pushcart Prize and been a PEN/Faulkner, California Book, and NYPL Young Lions finalist.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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