Read by Arthur Morey, Joy Osmanski, Kaleo Griffith, Mark Bramhall, Michael Bybee, Romy Rosemont, and Robbie Daymond
9 hours, 15 minutes
Published February 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf
Publisher's Summary:
In the collection's marvelous title story, two aging vampires in a sun-drenched Italian lemon grove find their hundred-year marriage tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. In "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979", a dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left in a seagull's nest. "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" - stories of children left to fend for themselves in dire predicaments - find Russell veering into more sinister territory, and ultimately crossing the line into full-scale horror. In "The New Veterans", a massage therapist working with a tattooed war veteran discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the images on his body. In all, these wondrous new pieces display a young writer of superlative originality and invention coming into the full range and scale of her powers.
My Thoughts:
Book two for Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.). Yea, me; although, I must admit that this was a complete coincidence. This is one of those books that I've been wondering about for a long time (a decade, actually), but it was getting an advanced copy of Russell's latest work (The Antidote) and having a break in the audiobooks I'd requested from the library, that finally had me picking this one up.
Maureen Corrigan (NPR) had this to say about the first story in this collection: "The title story kicks off this collection by doing the near impossible: making me care about vampires, a breed more overexposed these days than Labrador retrievers." I agree, despite my major skepticism when the story began. Poor Clyde is a vampire who can no longer transform into a bat and fly; instead he spends his days and nights sitting at a table at the back of a lemon grove, where no one except one young worker, seems to be aware of what he is. He lives for the arrival of his wife, who descends nightly from a cave on high, along with thousands of other bats. It was his wife who made him understand that they could survive without blood and the two of them discovered that lemons work as a kind of analgesic for their kind. But has their marriage reached its end? And will the reality of that cause Clyde to do the unthinkable? I liked this story much more and it set the bar high.
Like all collections of short stories (at least in my experience), not all stories are equal. I must admit that I gave up on "The New Veterans," which felt to me like it was dragging. But both "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" impressed me with their originality and twists. In "Proving Up," Russell has set her story in Nebraska (something she has repeated in The Antidote), which always makes a story more interesting to me. Each of these stories is a work of fantasy, a genre that you know I often struggle with, but here the fantasy element almost never overwhelmed the story. I mean, even a vampire just felt like a sad old man to me!
Perhaps my favorite thing about this collection was the fact that each of the stories was read by a different reader and each felt absolutely perfectly suited to the story they read.
I more eager than ever to get back to The Antidote and Russell's Swamplandia, which I own...somewhere (is it in print? is it on my Nook?).
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