Forensic Songs

May 12, 2014
The dark comedy of life plays out for a series of men and women in McCormack’s second short story collection (after Getting It in the Head). Staid realists, the characters in McCormack’s stories find themselves coping with hardscrabble circumstances tinted by the author’s signature irony: a woman’s near-death experience annoys her friends; brothers content in their lives stare down inevitable heart disease; a man’s long-missing uncle returns home, only to be swiftly diagnosed with a terminal illness. These stories range from the grim to the bizarre—in “There Is a Game Out There,” a wrongfully convicted prisoner discovers he is the victim of a massive conspiracy that results, in part, in his being asked to play and critique a video game based on his life (“These are the times,” a game representative tells him. “There is no principle or sacrifice that cannot be commoditized”). In “The Man from God Knows Where,” a character asks his brother to drive him into town so he can buy his own coffin. In “These Two Men,” a man is visited by secret agents who attempt to recruit him before getting sidetracked by an argument over college soccer. In the book’s title story, a grisly murder scene reveals itself to be the evening television fare of a tea-sipping couple. McCormack’s wry minitragedies punch above their weight, and when he combines the funny with the bleak, the stories are worth savoring.

Starred review from June 15, 2014
Irish stories, by turns subdued, witty and raucous.A world of wastrels, schemers and ne'er-do-wells inhabits McCormack's pubs, prisons and homes. "The Man from God Knows Where" introduces us to Mark Hanlon and his fragmented family-a recently returned brother, long thought dead; a dying father full of recriminations for both his sons; and a pious mother who, unlike the rest of the family, still believes in the power of prayer. Family life here is filled with bitterness and suppressed rage-and also with occasional glimpses into interpersonal understanding. The genuinely comic "The Last Thing We Need" features a long dialogue between a sergeant and a young prison guard who's been on the job for only eight weeks. The sergeant is outraged that they're in charge of seemingly the only prisoner in Ireland who has not written a childhood memoir. "Of One Mind" introduces us to a father who disappoints his 8-year-old son by not getting him to a school field trip in time, and the father realizes that "feelings like [his son's disappointment] only come man-sized, brutally disproportionate to the cause, never calibrated to the dimensions of a child's world." Later in the same story, in a scene both comic and touching, the son becomes convinced he will grow up to become a serial killer because he comes from a broken home and also wets his bed, two classic symptoms of killers-to-be.All 12 stories in this collection glisten with insight and poignancy.

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Starred review from September 1, 2014

McCormack's second collection offers a dozen tales of suspense, speculation, and imminent disaster. Readers of his previous stories and novels (e.g., Notes from a Coma)will recognize this groundbreaking author's synthesis of brainy storytelling and heartfelt characterization set against mysterious and sometimes menacing backdrops. McCormack's scenarios often feature people trapped, sometimes imprisoned, in relationships, histories, and institutions from which they struggle to free themselves. In many ways, readers share these struggles as they attempt to orient themselves in the author's fictional universe. For example, a prison inmate summoned from his cell in the early morning hours is offered redemption if he plays a video game. In another tale, a confounded husband implicates himself in a crime committed on a television procedural drama, while in yet another, a boy demands his father's complicity to fulfill the childhood profile of a serial killer. VERDICT Critics have compared McCormack's fiction to Samuel Beckett's and Irvine Welsh's, but he possesses his own sensibility. He effortlessly weaves Raymond Carver's lucidity together with Franz Kafka's otherworldly absurdity to craft narratives that seem familiar and satisfyingly strange at the same time.--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

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July 1, 2014
Irish writer McCormack (Notes from a Coma, 2013) has garnered widespread praise for his precision-tuned prose style and macabre vision of Irish culture. In his latest story collection, McCormack expands his range to include both poignant, present-day explorations of family wounds and dystopian tales of near-future societies tainted by misused technology. In The Last Thing We Need, a police sergeant and his young colleague contemplate the strange case of a renegade Irish citizen who defies his country's compulsory tradition of penning one's childhood memoirs. The protagonist of There Is a Game Out There is a prisoner whose video-game expertise makes him the hapless target of an outside gaming developer's manipulations. The precocious eight-year-old son of a single father in Of One Mind implores his baffled father to beat him so he won't grow up to be a serial killer. McCormack's consummate craftsmanship and equal facility with black humor, sober realism, and speculative fiction distinguish him as one of Ireland's leading literary talents.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)