Anya Johanna DeNiro

This collection of stories from Alan DeNiro proved to be a frustratingly mixed bag. There were a few strong entries, but they were mixed in with far too many experiments in style that seemed overly obtuse, meandering, or just too pointless to care about. Laboring through so many of the latter frustrated me enough to make me leery of seeking out DeNiro’s stories in the future. Which is a shame, because when the author has his storytelling hat situated firmly and confidently on his head, his show more wonderfully weird characters and settings—which at times approach George Saunders levels of surreal worldbuilding—actually help the stories become even more fully realized and rewarding. Three that stood out were “The Philip Sidney Game,” “Highly Responsive to Prayers,” and “The Wildfires of Antarctica.” The everpresent layers of weirdness are certainly evident in all of these stories, but in each of them the weirdness successfully adds to rather than distracts from the storytelling. show less

It is books of this ilk that put me off magical realism. It seems all to often to be an opportunity for lazy character resolution. The reader to expected to not notice/accept the totally unconvincing resolution of character interactions because, after all, this is a book of magical realism where nothing else made sense, so why should this?
And what I found most unbelievable about this book was not the magical changes that had taken place in the United States, rather that the characters in the show more book turned out not be recognizable as human beings. They reacted with neither the joy nor the pain, the curiosity nor the anger that one would expect human beings to feel in the situations they faced. show less

DeNiro cross-breeds the charged ambience of Philip Dick and Bill Burroughs, with Ballard, Pynchon and Cronenberg thrown into the mix. What emerges in Tyrannia is a unique dystopian future that is bleak, surreal, and yet not quite improbable.

The title story is a mobius strip that brings a new meaning to the term “life after death”.

There is a subterranean horror (metaphorically perhaps?) in “A Rendition” — a story about three students kidnapping a professor who helped draft the show more torture memos used in the War on Terror.

America is a radioactive wasteland in ‘The Warp and the Woof” where a writer and his agent play out an historic relationship in a feral new world.

A wild 21st century Dickian mind melter! show less

It is a post-apocalyptic world where modern electrical devices stop working, invaders on horseback wielding swords and axes are invading South, the Empire is fighting North, and large corporations have embraced the new world order by selling their workforce as slave labor. Macy and her family find themselves in the middle of this, and end up traveling south on the Mississippi to try and find a new life.

This world was pretty fascinating, but there was a distinct lack of real plot during the show more first half of the book when the Palmers were traveling on the river. It was interesting but was little more than a montage of all the weird shit that exists in the world now. In Part II, however, I really got sucked into the story and practically read the second half of the book straight through.

Because the story is told from the POV of an ordinary girl, you never really know WHY things are happening, which was mildly frustrating but realistic. DeNiro interjects a short excerpt from a document between each chapter to give more background to the story, which I thought was nicely done (even if the formatting and my Sony Reader did not get along).

I didn't like Macy, the POV character, at the beginning. She felt too passive -- which was symbolized by the river she was traveling on, carrying her wherever. But in Part II, she starts taking actions on her own and having to think for herself and I found myself liking her more. show less