Borrowed Hearts

A whopping gathering of thirty-two abrasive and colorful stories: twenty-one drawn from DeMarinis's three earlier collections, along with eleven previously uncollected tales. DeMarinis (The Mortician 's Apprentice, 1994, etc.), is one of our most underrated writers: a master of aslant character portrayal whose impressively zany fictions feature teenagers maturing (usually in the 1940s) into worlds distorted by adult lust or hypocrisy ( Safe Forever, Experience ); loners and grifters who reshape their worlds to accommodate their often unspeakable appetites ( Under the Wheat, Medicine Man ); and exhausted Everymen whose mundane disillusionments metastasize alarmingly into comic-horrible crises (the computer executive of Disneyland, drawn helplessly into the absurd orbits of his clinically depressed wife, suicidal son, and the latter's airheaded girlfriend, is a classic example). Here and there, we catch echoes of T.C. Boyle ( Life Between Meals ) or Stanley Elkin ( An Airman's Goodbye ). Then again, who but DeMarinis could concoct such beguiling horrors as a serial killer in a pawnshop trying to trade a necklace made of human kneecaps for a machete or a toddler traumatized by science-fiction movies who mutilated his new teddy bear with a steak knife ? There are few stories here that don't raise the pulse rate. Noteworthy among the newer are a complex, funky threnody on the physical sensations of aging ( Borrowed Hearts ); the understandably irritable confessions of a gun moll's eternally uprooted ten-year-old ( On the Lam ); and a beautifully developed (perhaps autobiographical) episodic story about surviving childhood within a chaotically fragmented family ( The Boys We Were, The Men We Became ). Comic surrealism fashioned with rowdy wit and apparently inexhaustible creative energy. (Kirkus Reviews)