Review by Booklist Review
This dazzling collection of short stories will be pinging around the minds of readers long after the back cover is closed. Hot on the trail of her debut novel, The Vexations (2019), Horrocks nails the short format by building easy-to-enter and hard-to-forget worlds. In the first story, "The Sleep," a frigid small town expedites their year by hibernating through the winter. In "Teacher," an educator reckons with the fate of a former student who throws a brick off an overpass and kills a young mother. In "25 Months," a girl at a party entertains a gentleman headed to prison the next day. In the titular tale, the residents of an experimental greenhouse utopia stage a coup to escape their bizarre imprisonment. The stories follow children, teenagers, and adults, and travel the world over, from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Peru, to Arizona, to Prague. Each story is as engrossing as if it were a full-length novel, and just as sad to leave. Perfect for fans of George Saunders and Karen Russell.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Vigorous and supremely crafted, Horrocks's second collection (after the novel The Vexations) explores human frailties, desires, and mechanisms for survival. In "The Sleep," family man Al Rasmussen persuades the fellow residents of his moribund Midwestern town to sleep through the winter (" 'Don't try to convince me,' Al said, 'that anything worthwhile happens in this town during January and February. I've lived here as long as you have' "). A posse of high school girls are haunted by their favorite fortune-telling games in "Better Not Tell You Now," and a former-cult member turned real estate agent takes his estranged son on a Boston-area college tour in "Chance Me." After a gruesome act of violence in "Teacher," an elementary school teacher considers whether one can really know how a student will turn out. The title story, one of the most arresting and inventive of the bunch, follows a small group of scientists, engineers, and a philosopher who live in an isolated artificial ecosystem, vying for the chance to win a small fortune. With 187 days to go and their faith in survival unraveling into disorder, the possibility of cannibalism becomes increasingly likely. Horrocks's linguistic finesse and narrative range is impressive, and she brings incisive humor, pathos, and wit to her characters and their predicaments. The result is an immersive and engaging work that astutely captures the complexities of the human condition. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A second short story collection from a writer known for her impeccable craft. Horrocks' latest is bookended by two similar stories. In the first, "The Sleep," which also appeared in the Best American Short Stories 2011, a widower convinces first his family and then most of his hardscrabble Upper Midwestern town to hibernate for the winter. The townspeople see it as practical: They'll save food and heat and money and, well, if it has the added effect of taking the edge off the tragedies they suffer, so much the better. In fact, the first-person-plural narrator muses, "We're better neighbors asleep in warm beds than we ever were awake." A fraught community is also at the fore of the final, and title, story, in which a group of scientists are part of a yearslong Mars simulation in the Arizona desert. After the group's crops fail and the terranauts begin to slowly starve, the narrator must face down the different brands of zealotry, including her own, that motivated them on their doomed experiment. Horrocks' characters throughout are stuck at strange angles to their communities, connoisseurs of isolation. In one of the best stories, "Sun City," a young gay woman with a history of keeping lovers at arm's length helps to clean out her late grandmother's place while trying to figure out if her grandmother's garrulous roommate was actually something more. Horrocks' stories feel classic and melancholy, like a concerto in a minor key. While the writing may feel overly polished to those who like their fiction a bit wilder, the characters' flawed decisions add a bit of welcome roughness. Elegant glimpses into the lives of lonely people. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
