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margaret_adams's review
This was a great collection of short stories. Cook uses first-person-plural in two of the stories without it being gimicky, and in all of them, she uses surrealism as springboard for some unsettlingly on-point observations about human nature. The first story "Moving On" is the best I've read in a while.
pleasereadittome's review
2.0
While many of the stories are rooted in humanity's primal desires, the overall collection is rather tedious at times. All of the stories start out promising, but only a few finish strong. If I were to recommend this collection -- which I don't -- I would only focus on these:
- Moving On: an unsettling world of arranged marriages and internment camps.
- Girl on Girl: a disturbing view of the lengths teens will go to belong.
- Meteorologist Dave Santana: while long-winded, it's a fascinating character study.
I read this in less than week and in reviewing the table of contents couldn't even remember what some of the stories were about. That should tell you a lot right there. I'm still haunted by almost every story in "Friday Black" and "Interpreter of Maladies."
- Moving On: an unsettling world of arranged marriages and internment camps.
- Girl on Girl: a disturbing view of the lengths teens will go to belong.
- Meteorologist Dave Santana: while long-winded, it's a fascinating character study.
I read this in less than week and in reviewing the table of contents couldn't even remember what some of the stories were about. That should tell you a lot right there. I'm still haunted by almost every story in "Friday Black" and "Interpreter of Maladies."
dasyreads's review
4.0
This is a hard book to review, I don't know that I loved the stories - but they were very compelling. Typically short story books are good for me because I can read one then go to sleep. But this book I read over half of it in one night - and only put it down because it was late.
lovelyoutliers's review against another edition
5.0
It's been a long time since I read a collection of short stories, and Cook has really dazzled me with her collection. Each of these stories is set in a world eerily recognizable - basically our reality but with something a little off-kilter, resulting in creepy but gripping tales. Each story absorbed me from the beginning (the man standing in a new mother's front yard as she brings home her baby, the woman obsessively consumed by fantasies about her local meteorologist, 10 year old boys determined as "unnecessary"). I think the thing that is so captivating about these stories is their quotidian details conceal a much darker, dystopian underside which scratches at the very nature of human behaviour. Really rather extraordinary.
ale_roselyn's review
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cannibalism and Grief
Moderate: Violence, Abandonment, Murder, Infertility, Gore, and Cursing
sharonbakar's review
5.0
4.6 rounded up.
I bought this book (on Kindle) after really enjoying one of the stories, Flotsam, read on the Selected Shorts podcast. Then I found two more "friends" in the book Moving On (one of my favourite stories in Best American Short Stories 2015) and The Mast Year (also on Selected Shorts). Often dark, frequently bizarre, these are allegorical stories about the deepest human needs and desires. They seem to take place in a world so much like our own, but the rules that govern society have shifted. In chilling story The Not-Needed Forest, boys who are "not needed" are sent to an incinerator, but a few escapees band together in a forest fighting for survival; for me, it occupies the same territory as Lord of the Flies and reminds me of a horrible tale in Robert Hughes' saga of the history of Australia, The Fatal Shore. In Moving On, a newly widowed woman finds herself incarcerated in an institution with others in the same position, and must work through the stages of grief before she can be released. In Flotsam, a woman keeps finding baby clothes in with her washing. Somebody's Baby a man hangs around a woman's house waiting to steal her newborn, and we wonder if she can keep her safe, especially as so many of her neighbours have lost children and are almost non-challent about it.
This is a deeply thought-provoking, highly entertaining collection which reminded me of some of George Saunder's short stories. I liked them better because the questions they pose seem more personal ....
I bought this book (on Kindle) after really enjoying one of the stories, Flotsam, read on the Selected Shorts podcast. Then I found two more "friends" in the book Moving On (one of my favourite stories in Best American Short Stories 2015) and The Mast Year (also on Selected Shorts). Often dark, frequently bizarre, these are allegorical stories about the deepest human needs and desires. They seem to take place in a world so much like our own, but the rules that govern society have shifted. In chilling story The Not-Needed Forest, boys who are "not needed" are sent to an incinerator, but a few escapees band together in a forest fighting for survival; for me, it occupies the same territory as Lord of the Flies and reminds me of a horrible tale in Robert Hughes' saga of the history of Australia, The Fatal Shore. In Moving On, a newly widowed woman finds herself incarcerated in an institution with others in the same position, and must work through the stages of grief before she can be released. In Flotsam, a woman keeps finding baby clothes in with her washing. Somebody's Baby a man hangs around a woman's house waiting to steal her newborn, and we wonder if she can keep her safe, especially as so many of her neighbours have lost children and are almost non-challent about it.
This is a deeply thought-provoking, highly entertaining collection which reminded me of some of George Saunder's short stories. I liked them better because the questions they pose seem more personal ....
matthewcpeck's review
4.0
Diane Cook's striking story collection focuses on ordinary people in surreally extreme circumstances, in the spirit of "The Exterminating Angel". With calm and uncluttered prose, she pulls the reader into scenes that waver between nightmarish and funny. There not an a forgettable story in the bunch, but my favorites include the title story (three middle-aged dudes on a fishing trip get inexplicably lost in the middle of a lake, and drift towards oblivion); "It's Coming" (an office building under attack by a giant monster, told in plural first person); "Somebody's Baby" (a town in which newborns are serially abducted by a shadowy man). The two comparatively "realistic" stories - "Girl on Girl" and "Meteorologist Dave Santana" - are just as interesting; the former testing my squeamishness and the latter filled with humanity. "Man Vs. Nature" is a beautifully controlled collection that manages to be simultaneously outlandish and uncomfortably close-to-home.
an_enthusiastic_reader's review
3.0
The stories in this collection are exciting and fresh, but they're also grim to the point of exhaustion. There's a spareness to the language that makes them more like tales than stories, and that level of remove makes them less present.
cameliarose's review against another edition
3.0
Man V. Nature is a collection of 12 short stories. It is very hard to rate a collection that ranges from fantastic to total disappointment. These three are the best in the collection: The Way the End of Days Should Be, Man V. Nature, and The Not-Needed Forest, all speculative fictions set in the end of our time, piercing, shocking, and brutal. The last one reminds me of Lord of the Flies. Girl On Gill is a surreal and disturbing little story.
I find the longest story, Meteorologist Dave Santana, is a big disappointment, so is The Mast Year. A Wanted Man is totally pointless.
I find the longest story, Meteorologist Dave Santana, is a big disappointment, so is The Mast Year. A Wanted Man is totally pointless.
neven's review
5.0
Wow. What a debut—a confident, terrifying, stunning book. It's kafkaesque not like The Trial, but like In The Penal Colony. It's like Cormac McCarthy, but set in a world more cruel. Like Hans Christian Andersen, but only the stuff that didn't make it to Disney.