Small Things Like These

 By Claire Keegan

Faber     2022

110 pages     Literary

When I was a girl in the 1960s, I knew a couple of girls who disappeared from school for several months, only to return after “visiting some relatives” or “living with Grandma and Grandpa.” Claire Keegan explores this all-too-common occurrence in her 2022 Booker Prize-nominated novella, Small Things Like These. And just like in 1960s Minnesota, in 1980s Ireland, these things are not talked about and remain a secret.

Small Things Like These is so intricately woven in only 110 pages, that I realized after I read it the first time that I was missing something. So I read it again, and my heart broke at the integrity of Bill Furlong, an almost 40-year-old man who owns the village coal and lumber company. Bill is married and the father of five daughters. He is a stalwart, well-respected  member of the community. He goes to mass every week and his daughters go to school and get music training at the school run by the local nuns. One day he makes a discovery that makes him confront both his past and the complicit silence of his community—a community completely controlled by the Catholic Church.

Christmas plays a role in the story line. In one delightful scene, Furlong’s children all write letters to Santa with their lists of presents. Bill and his wife Eileen read the letters after the children go to bed, choose the presents they can afford from the list, and then burn the letters in the fireplace. We are made completely aware of the unity and the love within this family.

Yet Furlong yearns for more. This paragraph is profound in the way he thinks about life. “Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same—or would they just lose the run of themselves?”

Claire Keegan is one of Ireland’s most prominent authors, and this was the first book I had read written by her. It is brilliant in the concept as well as in the composition. I am absolutely amazed at her ability to say so much in so few words. We understand Bill Furlong; we understand his community; and we understand the secret the community is holding. I was overwhelmed.

Two awesome reviews of her book.  New York Times and NPR.

A Darker Shade of Noir

Edited by Joyce Carol Oates

Akashic Books     2023

266 pages     Noir/Horror

Joyce Carol Oates has written a remarkable introduction to A Darker Shade of Noir, Akashic Books’ newest addition to their collections of Noir fiction. It really tells you everything you need to know about the book and its outstanding group of women authors, each of whom contributed a story to the collection, including Oates, Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, and Megan Abbott—authors that I knew about and had read before. The introduction can be found here.

 The stories in the collection tell every type of modern versions of female-related horror similar to the mythological figures whose names we know, such as Medusa, or the Salem witches. Each of the stories considers one type of female horror. For example, “Frank Jones” by Aimee Bender really captures your attention when she tells the story of a young woman with skin tags that she saves to horrifying results. The woman in the next story by Tananarive Due can’t stop dancing. She has been dancing ever since her grandmother died.

I think most women understand the idea of body horror in its more basic forms, as well as the history of the subjugation of women through the centuries. Joyce Carol Oates addresses this superbly in the written diary of a woman in a mental asylum in the mid-1800s. And, of course, there is the accounting by Margaret Atwood of a snail that invades a woman’s skull, her soul, and her psyche. Way creepy!

But I really got spooked by Megan Abbott’s story about a haunted house in Penny’s neighborhood. Apparently the doctor who owned the house killed his wife and children many years before. Through the years, neighborhood children told the story of the killing and the haunting. Young Penny decides to investigate one night to disastrous results. I remembered a big deserted house on the river in the small Minnesota town I lived in as a child. The really brave kids would run up the steps and knock on the door on Halloween. One Halloween,  I thought I saw a light in one of the upstairs rooms, and everyone ran out of that yard as fast as we could! I had a bad dream the night I read Abbott’s story!

I could go on and on. These are marvelous stories that touched a real nerve—in both my body and my mind. Highly recommended.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Saving Myles

By Carl Vonderau

Oceanview     2023

33 pages     Thriller

It is every parent’s worst nightmare: Wade and Fiona Bosworth are shocked to find that their 18-year-old son, Myles,  is using drugs and may even be selling them.  They had already spent a huge amount of money at a drug-rehab program at the Hidden Road Academy in Utah, and now, he seems to have stooped even lower. The stress has caused his parents to separate, and the carefully crafted training Myles has been under has crashed. He has a new girlfriend, and together they cross the border to Tijuana to buy drugs to sell.

Myles is kidnapped by a drug cartel, and the kidnappers are asking a huge amount of ransom. Although Wade is a banker, he does not have the resources to meet the ransom demands until Fiona’s boss at the nonprofit she works for says he can help with the ransom. Everything in all of their lives falls apart at the moment.

The first half of Saving Myles is very much concerned with Myles’ welfare—his training at the Academy, his rebellion, his kidnapping, and the ways his parents negotiate to pay the ransom with help from Andre, Fiona’s boss. It is then that Wade’s banker training kicks in. We learn more than we might want to learn about real estate bankers, the complexities of banking, and possible collusion with rich Mexican criminals. Everything bogs down for a while, and then in the last quarter of the book, we reach a satisfactory conclusion on all fronts.

It is obvious that Vonderau knows a lot about banking, because, of course, his first career was as a banker. I have often chuckled about how many thriller authors are former lawyers, and now we have a banker. The kind of business he does is very much like the kind of business my husband did, real estate investment. I understood the complexities that Wade is negotiating as he works to find the money to pay the kidnappers, but I could only imagine what the reader who knows nothing about this type of finance is thinking.  Luckily, readers are so concerned about saving Myles that they can just read through the morass of business dealings.

In other words, the worry about Myles supersedes the complexities of the narrative. One reviewer says, “Carl Vonderau masterfully weaves a complex and twisted narrative, exploring the depths of a parent’s love when faced with seemingly unfathomable criminal situations, intrigue, suspense and tension.”

I don’t think that I would have found Saving Myles on my own, but it came to me from the publisher. The cover and description intrigued me, and the tension of the plot kept me reading. I think you will as well.

Carl Vonderau website.