Black light Stories

Kimberly King Parsons

Book - 2019

"With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire's darkest hollows - those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood. Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl - sharp-voiced, acerbic, and wise"--

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Subjects
Genres
Short stories
Published
New York : Vintage Books 2019.
Language
English
Main Author
Kimberly King Parsons (author)
Physical Description
211 pages : 20 cm
ISBN
9780525563501
  • Guts
  • In our circle
  • Glow hunter
  • The animal part
  • Foxes
  • The soft no
  • We don't come natural to it
  • The light will pour in
  • Into the fold
  • Black light
  • Fiddlebacks
  • Starlite.
Review by Booklist Review

Set largely in and around Texas, Parson's assured debut story collection finds characters on the cusp of uneasy change. The standout Glow Hunter follows two high school friends during the scorching summer after graduation. Enigmatic Bo and studious narrator Sara are seeming opposites who find themselves inexplicably drawn to one another. Their simmering relationship is further complicated by Bo's boyfriend, Jeff, who was also Sara's childhood friend, before their paths diverged. In Foxes an alcoholic mother struggles to connect with her young daughter while confronting bitter, muddled memories of the relationship with her daughter's father. In many of the stories, characters mine and confront unexpected truths. In The Soft No, the physicality of an adolescent outdoors game is shaped by revealing undertones. In Starlite, office worker Jill and her manager, Rick, call off work to get high in a hotel room, the hours ticking by with the delirium of flight offset by uncomfortable certainty. Imbued with the expanses of their landscapes, Parson's dozen tales portray characters navigating unavoidable shifts in the realities of their lives.--Leah Strauss Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Parsons's debut crackles with the frenetic energy of the women who stalk its pages. In opening story "Guts," Sheila has just started dating "almost-doctor" Tim, whose particular brand of condescending masculine practicality destabilizes her already-erratic lifestyle. In "Foxes," a recently divorced mother recounts her courtship and marriage to her ex-husband, whom she calls "the fool," as she listens to her young daughter spin a story featuring knights and inky enemies, and the two stories begin to intertwine and mimic the cadences of each other. "Foxes" kicks off a dazzling run of stories, including "The Soft No," in which a pair of siblings must navigate neighborhood politics as well as their unpredictable mother, to "We Don't Come Natural to It," in which two women's pursuit of beauty becomes a vortex of self-inflicted violence, control, and mistrust. In the title story, a young woman watches as her former lover evolves into someone she realizes she never knew, while she must navigate the breakup in a way that doesn't out her sexuality. Parsons's characters are sharp and uncannily observed, bound up in elastic and electrifying prose. This is a first-rate debut. (Aug.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Stories that can make you believe that doing cocaine all day in a cheap motel is fun or that catching bugs is a great way to spend your childhood.Parsons' debut collection is not long on plot, but wisdom and humor are so thick on the ground you could find a sentence worth quoting on every page. "The first rule of filing isnothing comes before something." "There are tricks to coping with a surly person you've brought into the world. Focus on the positive." "I have no idea why sports and religion interminglethey just do. It seems some people take Jesus for a jock." Two characters at the Starlite motel in Houston: "There are only two things people do in places like this.And we've already done all the drugs." Only they haven'tco-workers Jill and Rick are taking a holiday from their lives and from their spouses (code-named Eyelash and Kneecap at a previous happy hour), and new baggies of powder keep turning up right till quittin' time. They are one of many memorable pairs in these stories, several of which are about the blurry line between friendship and love. The narrator of "Glow Hunter" is crazy about her friend Bo, who is just "more brightly lit than the rest of us.I've seen strangers stop what they're doing to watch her shake sugar into her tea." Bo and the narrator have both been involved with a guy named Jeff, but what they really want is each other. The narrator of "Black Light" is in love with a point guard on the girls basketball team; she is counseled, then consoled by her older brother. (" 'Dick,' he said, done with subtlety. 'She needs dick.' ") Comparisons have been made to Denis Johnson, Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machadoand we'll add Angela Carter. The Angela Carter of Lubbock, Texas. It has a ring to it.Just keeps getting better as you turn the pages. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.