The Unsettling
Stories
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures, the thirteen stories in The Unsettling attend to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is suddenly revealed as mysterious and foreign.
A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to a coworker's tale about a blind woman and imbues it with his own sense of romance; a woman drives a Gold Firebird through the desert with a television playing "Rockford Files" reruns on the passenger seat; and a girl returns to her childhood home to spy on its new inhabitants, not realizing they are aware of her surveillance; a Poe–obsessed medical examiner constructs ornate scenes in an attempt to provoke hope in the forgotten lives of a dark and desperate city.
Told through Rock's imaginative and wholly original voice, these are haunted tales about fascination, transformation, and the relationship between the two.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Rock (The Ambidextrist) gathers 13 odd, haunting tales in a patchwork collection that borrows elements from genre fiction (the ghost; the stalker; the hitchhiker) while paying homage to literary lights (to Chekhov explicitly; to Poe and, one suspects, Murukami). In Rock's bleak world, the isolated and maladjusted seek connections: in "Blooms," a young man hired to remove mold from damp library books learns how his elder coworker used to sit naked in his blind neighbor's bedroom and read to her; in "The Silent Men," a waitress receives late-night phone calls from a stranger who got her number from her "Lost Dogs" poster; in "The Sharpest Knife," a middle-aged man sneaks into the bedroom of his eight-year-old neighbor to write cryptic messages in her school notebook. "Lights" is a rather bloodless rewrite of the Chekhov story of the same name, in which a loquacious older man tells a bored youth and a stranger the story of his entanglement with a desperate woman; "Thrill" tells of a young married couple's surprising response to a youthful, female peeping Tom. Mysterious, inventive, but often pallid and unrewarding, these stories are strange but perhaps not quite strange enough.
