Wedding in December

Anita Shreve - Stephen King - Nicholas Montemarano

Wedding in December By Anita Shreve. (Little, Brown, €12.99.)

You might think that a clique of privileged, navel-gazing 40-somethings who reunite for a wedding and spend the weekend at an inn drinking cabernet sauvignon and rehashing prep school days would come off as a tad self-involved. And hey, you'd be right. Happily, Shreve's knack for engrossing storytelling mostly makes up for the bourgeois malaise. This post-9/11 novel (the characters think and talk repeatedly about the World Trade Center) explores missed opportunities and second chances. Six of the seven main characters are in, or have been in, relationships that range from deeply dysfunctional to just plain depressing; the only character who seems at all happy is gay. Prep school will traumatize anybody, but this group was especially scarred by the death of a golden-boy classmate just before graduation. The incident is referred to obliquely - "the scene at the cottage," "that night," "the night of the party" - and Shreve wrings a pleasurable amount of suspense from the setup before the inevitable reveal. There's also a story within the story, a risky narrative maneuver, right up there with the long expository letter (Shreve includes a couple of those too, the daredevil), but she pulls it off, and the tale of historical disaster one of her characters is writing is a page turner. Regrettably, back at the inn, it's only when the characters stop thinking and start interacting that the main narrative finds a similar urgency.

THE COLORADO KID.

By Stephen King. (Hard Case Crime, paper, €7.30.)

It's rare that a novel comes with an explanation from its author, but Stephen King can't resist including one in the afterword to this slender (yes, slender!) mystery: "Depending on whether you liked or hated 'The Colorado Kid' (I think for many people there'll be no middle ground on this one, and that's fine with me), you have my friend Scott to thank or blame. He brought me the news clipping that got it going." Scott's ears may burn in the coming months as reader after reader gets to the end of King's novel only to face bafflement. The setup? A crotchety pair of old newspaper men tell the story of an unsolved death to a young female reporter - and she listens. Part of the Hard Case Crime series, the book is packaged to look like a dime-store paperback from the 1950's, though the setting is contemporary. To recap: it's a mystery that isn't a mystery so much as a book that comments on mysteries, designed to look like a midcentury pulp novel. And you thought "Misery" was postmodern.

IF THE SKY FALLS: Stories.

By Nicholas Montemarano. (Louisiana State University, paper, €18.25.)

Montemarano's remarkable stories are united by their dyspeptic outlook and not much else: this collection, his first, includes straightforward narratives and metafictional experiments, a surreal fantasy about grief, an acerbic parable of torture and the commercialization of 9/11, and one audacious 11-page sentence that hilariously (but grimly) details the tyranny of an obsessive-compulsive mother who demands that her children clean house just so. If there's a theme, it might be that damaged people have no business taking care of others, or even interacting with them. On the other hand, it might be that everybody is damaged beyond repair. One narrator, a passive-aggressive home health aide, does a good job describing all of Montemarano's characters when he talks about "the usual human disabilities, like not knowing how to be nice or being a little too funny for your own good." As the book proceeds, the experimental detours start to feel less ambitious and more perfunctory, but Montemarano's deft storytelling and ruthless honesty ensure that this collection is as dark and dazzling as a mine shaft studded with diamonds.

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