Voodoo Heart

Booklist

The dialogue is snappy, the characters sharp, and the story lines consuming...Snyder is masterful, and the fact that he draws on uniquely American symbols, stories, and songs makes Voodoo Heart outstanding and unusual, and a spectacular debut.
—(starred review)

Publishers Weekly

Reading Scott Snyder's accomplished first story collection, Voodoo Heart, is a little like watching a magician pull rabbits out of a hat. No matter how many times you've seen the trick performed, you still marvel that someone has figured out not only how to do it but, more important, how to persuade the audience that no one has ever done it exactly that way before. Snyder's particular sleight of hand enables him to make the unlikely seem disturbingly familiar; he bends and stretches the laws of ordinary causality just enough so that, when his narratives snap back, there's a twang that reverberates after the final line. His protagonists are young romantics worried about the conflict between authenticity and adventurousness, torn between a self-protective longing for solitude and a longing for some deeper loyalty to another human being. What they mistake for life-changing passion may turn out to be simple-and terrible-misunderstanding, and a chance encounter may initiate a chain of events that will alter them forever. Many reside just outside odd or intentional communities (a boot camp for troubled teens, a summer haven for overweight kids) in which they take an almost anthropological interest. Others are in transit or in flight, reluctant to confront that what looked like a whimsical job opportunity or a brief vacation from ordinary life may in fact be a permanent dead end. In the title story, a young couple renovates an abandoned Florida mansion that borders on a women's prison-a proximity that intensifies the hero's most secret and desperate concerns about his true nature. In another tale, an equally conflicted young man meets a celebrity convalescing from drastic plastic surgery and becomes involved in a meteoric affair that flames out as her recovery changes his sense of what it means to be injured. In "Dumpster Tuesday," a guy who seems to have everything (or just enough) loses it all when his girlfriend leaves him for a brain-damaged, improbably charismatic country singer, and in "About Face," a trumpet player working at a juvenile detention center learns a painful lesson about illness, compassion and the mysteries of sex. Suffused with sly humor, sympathy and high spirits, the stories in Voodoo Heart are giddy with the thrill of discovering what can be done with words, what you can make happen on the page. The result is as irreducible and rewarding as making playing cards disappear or pulling gold coins out of thin air. Francine Prose's most recent book is Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. Her new book, Reading like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them will be published in the fall. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Short stories from an author who's starred in Zoetrope, Tin House, and other venues. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Seven solidly constructed stories celebrate characters who are lost and don't necessarily wish to be found. Notable here is newcomer Snyder's thoughtful development of characters and themes. "Blue Yodel," set in 1918, describes the increasing desperation of a lovelorn young man in pursuit of a zeppelin bearing away the woman he loves. Pres works as a barrel-watcher at Niagara Falls, and his failure to understand the lure of the falls points to "some larger flaw" in his nature; while Claire, a mime in a Buffalo wax museum, proves herself brightly capable of spontaneity and escapes him. Similarly, in "The Star Attraction of 1919," a barnstormer down on his luck accidentally lands in the middle of an outdoor wedding party in Kansas and, in a curious turn of events, takes off with the bride. Although they become a star aviation attraction and even fall in love, what attracts Helen is not John per se but the thrill of danger and flight. Other stories delineate with chilling precision and depth the haplessness of emotionally diffident characters. "Wreck" tracks a young man derailed from a childhood accident, unable to re-route himself to a successful life. The title story finds a young couple ensconced in a beautiful Florida house that happens to adjoin a women's prison; as the young man's interest in spying on the inmates increases, so does his fear of making a commitment to his girlfriend. "Happy Fish, Plus Coin" (the name of the Chinese restaurant in Orlando where the protagonists meet) painstakingly develops an unlikely friendship between a young man trying to flee the tentacles of his rich family and a wheelchair-bound confidence man who has escaped death three times-a truly bizarre tale.A pleasure to read, particularly for Snyder's careful attention to his craft.