Blood - Hardcover

A story collection from Scottish writer Galloway--reflecting a typically bleak late-20th-century British landscape and informing ethos--makes its American debut. Galloway writes about a sunless world of grimy streets, drunken men, and brutalized women. Many of the pieces are little more than brief sketches of a mood, place, or character; others resemble scenes from a play. All are relentlessly downbeat, even macabre. In the title story, a callous dentist dismisses a young patient after an extraction, ``with an unstoppable redness seeping through the fingers of her open mouth.'' In ``Breaking Through,'' a beloved cat is allowed to burn to death while a little girl watches; and in ``Two Fragments,'' two equally nasty explanations are given to a child for her grandmother's glass eye. Three notable pieces are: ``Later He Would Open His Eyes in a Strange Place, Wondering Where She,'' in which an elderly couple read the biography of Arthur Koestler, then decide to imitate him by committing suicide together; ``Plastering the Cracks,'' where a young woman engages some workmen but, later, eavesdropping through the wall, becomes fearful of their intentions; and ``A Week with Uncle Felix,'' in which Stenga, a withdrawn young girl unable to ask questions about her long-dead father (``You couldn't ask what he was like: that was the kind of question you never got much of an answer for. Or it got turned into something else: drunk and violent'') is abused by an elderly uncle. Powerful images and ideas in stories often too elliptical and fragmentary to engage fully. An interesting but uneven debut. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The brilliant, vividly drawn images in this marvelous collection will deliver a satisfying shock of recognition to American readers, and no doubt ensure acclaim for this young Scottish writer. A character's waist-length hair is cut for the first time in "Into the Roots" and we see that "a long neck, very white from lack of sun, had grown up in the dark like a silent mushroom." In the title story, a tooth is pulled, "the gum parting with a sound like uprooting potatoes." Still other stories evoke darkly stained, often disturbing, images of human nature: A young woman remembers cowering behind her mother's skirts at the spectre of Fearless, the eponymous bogeyman, who would "clink and drag" up the street "like Marley's ghost." In "later he would open his eyes," an elderly couple's suicide pact has the old man imagining their car as it plunges off an embankment "ticking over like a child's cough. Ticking over and lurching as though it might stall." If it is the job of the serious writer to recreate experience and give it new life on the page, then Galloway ( The Trick Is to Keep on Breathing ) should be gainfully employed for many years to come.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.