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Adam McOmber's forthcoming book, This New & Poisonous Air, was recently reviewed by Donna Seaman for Booklist. The review in its entirety is printed here:
"In his first book, a collection of short stories that ventures into fable, myth, and fairy tale, McOmber's language is so finely burnished it nearly achieves invisibility. Most of these mysterious tales are set in the past, and all involve strange, even macabre embodiments of forbidden passions. in the title story, a girl abandoned by her father after the bubonic plague claims her mother adapts to the 'new and poisonous air.' A seventeenth-century inventor in France, thwarted in his love for a handsome dancer, builds a wondrous, if unnerving, mechanical garden, the first of many alternative worlds McOmber imagines in which his heartbroken characters attempt to take refuge. Marie Tussaud prefers her wax figures to those of flesh and blood following the French Revolution. A lonely English lord, forced to hide his feelings for other men, immerses himself in the exploits of an imaginary knight. A town's rapture in a movie palace takes on sinister dimensions. Eerie, sorrowful, and disquieting, McOmber's exquisite tales of taboo longings brilliantly illuminate the gossamer divide between loss and love, madness and reason, death and life."
This New & Poisonous Air reviewed in Booklist
[caption id="attachment_1017" align="aligncenter" width="196" caption="This New & Poisonous Air. Stories by Adam McOmber."][/caption]
Adam McOmber's forthcoming book, This New & Poisonous Air, was recently reviewed by Donna Seaman for Booklist. The review in its entirety is printed here:
"In his first book, a collection of short stories that ventures into fable, myth, and fairy tale, McOmber's language is so finely burnished it nearly achieves invisibility. Most of these mysterious tales are set in the past, and all involve strange, even macabre embodiments of forbidden passions. in the title story, a girl abandoned by her father after the bubonic plague claims her mother adapts to the 'new and poisonous air.' A seventeenth-century inventor in France, thwarted in his love for a handsome dancer, builds a wondrous, if unnerving, mechanical garden, the first of many alternative worlds McOmber imagines in which his heartbroken characters attempt to take refuge. Marie Tussaud prefers her wax figures to those of flesh and blood following the French Revolution. A lonely English lord, forced to hide his feelings for other men, immerses himself in the exploits of an imaginary knight. A town's rapture in a movie palace takes on sinister dimensions. Eerie, sorrowful, and disquieting, McOmber's exquisite tales of taboo longings brilliantly illuminate the gossamer divide between loss and love, madness and reason, death and life."
[/caption]
Adam McOmber's forthcoming book, This New & Poisonous Air, was recently reviewed by Donna Seaman for Booklist. The review in its entirety is printed here:
"In his first book, a collection of short stories that ventures into fable, myth, and fairy tale, McOmber's language is so finely burnished it nearly achieves invisibility. Most of these mysterious tales are set in the past, and all involve strange, even macabre embodiments of forbidden passions. in the title story, a girl abandoned by her father after the bubonic plague claims her mother adapts to the 'new and poisonous air.' A seventeenth-century inventor in France, thwarted in his love for a handsome dancer, builds a wondrous, if unnerving, mechanical garden, the first of many alternative worlds McOmber imagines in which his heartbroken characters attempt to take refuge. Marie Tussaud prefers her wax figures to those of flesh and blood following the French Revolution. A lonely English lord, forced to hide his feelings for other men, immerses himself in the exploits of an imaginary knight. A town's rapture in a movie palace takes on sinister dimensions. Eerie, sorrowful, and disquieting, McOmber's exquisite tales of taboo longings brilliantly illuminate the gossamer divide between loss and love, madness and reason, death and life."
- Categories: Book Reviews