Review by Booklist Review
Author of The Grip of It (2017) and A Different Bed Every Time (2014), Jemc returns with 20 electrifying short stories, some no longer than a few pages, but every one odd and memorable for wildly different reasons. From a woman who impersonates an heirloom dealer to sabotage a sale to the fastidious taxidermist whose solitary life verges on social isolation, Jemc populates her stories with characters who may seem familiar, but whose actions often veer feverishly off-script. ""Get Back"" catalogs a dungeon master's torture and execution strategies with chilling nonchalance. ""Default"" unravels a catalog of a daughter's notes to her deceased father and reveals a devastating family secret in the very last moments of his funeral. But not every story deals in such high stakes: ""Loser"" follows a high school student who saves up enough money for a popular perfume, only to be surprised when her classmates revile the aroma. A writer compared to Shirley Jackson and Henry James, Jemc continues to solidify her standing as a talented writer of the uncanny, the horrifying, and the hilarious.--Diego Báez Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Jemc's electric, nimble collection (after The Grip of It) plumbs its characters' most intimate relationships and unearths potent hidden truths. In "Delivery," a father's sudden spike in online shopping signifies a troubling development. In "Don't Let's," a woman stays in the Georgia Lowcountry, trying to clear her mind after leaving an abusive relationship, but finds signs of a ghost's presence in her house. "Pastoral," about the work of a porn actress who has a husband and two sons, defies convention by having no conflict at all ("There are no wolves at the door.... There is no obstacle that requires overcoming"). A woman's stay at a wellness retreat is impinged upon by an overbearing fellow retreater in "Maulawiyah." In "Hunt and Catch," a woman named Emily is ominously followed by a man in a garbage truck ("When he waved, Emily felt like someone had shoved the skin of her face in the direction of his hand"). In "Trivial Pursuit," an unnamed couple is irritated by the eccentricities of a couple known as the Board Game Couple before dumping them for the Artist Couple, followed by a succession of other couples, each with their own problems. Many of these stories are only a few pages, allowing Jemc to deliver a range of payoffs, some unsettling, some poignant, all evocative. This constantly shifting collection will leave readers beguiled. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Twenty short stories about people in the muted extremes of ordinary lives.Jemc's (The Grip of It, 2017, etc) stories revel in disquiet. Sometimes this uneasiness is the palpable result of external forces, as in "Don't Let's," in which a woman seeking solitude in the aftermath of an assault may or may not be haunted by a boo hag. Sometimes they expand into gleeful expressions of the macabre, as in "Get Back," an unrepentant litany of gruesome deaths narrated by the succubuslike murderer herself; or in "Strange Loop," where the ex-con main character, John, "forget[s] the trembling urges he kept in check" through his total immersion in taxidermy. More often, however, the stories nudge up against confrontational situations that they then allow to dissipate. In "Manifest," Bernadette's seemingly plot-instigating encounter with a man with "movie-star good looks" in the plastic surgeon's office is left behind as the story veers toward an exploration of her determined isolation. In the wonderfully eerie "Hunt and Catch," the multiple perils that accompany Emily's commute home from worka stalking dump truck driver; an overly attentive good Samaritan; her own suddenly unreliable perceptionsare left outside her locked door as she attends to the "quiet dark[ness]" of her private life. In "Maulawiyah," one of the longer and more conventionally structured stories in the collection, Raila is on a mindfulness retreat where her best intentions toward introspection are interrupted by the pitch-perfect Lisa, whose irritating narcissism Jemc chooses to neither elevate into malevolence nor excuse by way of empathetic backstory. Instead Raila and Lisa are allowed to linger in the singular moment of their relationship in a way that resonates for the reader more like a memory of their own discomfort than it does a story aiming toward a purposeful conclusion. Jemc's insistence on her stories' rights not to resolve their dilemmas is the thread that binds this book together, though too many similarly disaffected characters make the stories difficult to digest back to back. The result is a collection that will disappoint a reader looking for a tightly controlled narrative arc but delight one willing to learn how these particular stories want to be read.Tense, well-imagined stories whose tendencies to unravel mirror the characters they chronicle. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
