The Wishing Pool and Other Stories
Story collections are always a mixed bag, but I liked most of these a lot. It’s divided into four thematic parts so I included my thoughts about each part along with my favorite quote from each story.
Part I Wishes - I love a story about a double-edged wish, like The Monkey’s Paw, and the stories in this section is full of that kind of wish.
The Wishing Pool - “He was harvesting his memories, collecting them one by one. Catching them while he could.”
Haint in the Window - “The more names he called out to the silence, the more a cold loneliness wrapped itself around Darryl’s chest, the feeling he sometimes tried to drink away with half a bottle of wine after work, when there was nothing else for his hands and mind to do except remember that, once upon a time, he’d planned a bigger life.”
Incident at Bear Creek Lodge - “You’re gonna spend every goddamn day of your life pretending.”
Return to Bear Creek Lodge - “A white fox-worm from hell.”
Thursday-Night Shift - “Violence was the humans’ tradition, and the end of one Now led to another.”
Dancing - “Monique had not known you could love someone so much, and want to hold onto them with such fervor, that you could swallow them inside of you — even their dead dreams. And that those dreams could eat you in return.”
Part II The Gracetown Stories - The Reformatory was one of my 5-star reads last year (and I plan a reread next month) - I loved reading more stories from Gracetown. When can we have a tv series?
Last Stop on Route 9 - “Times weren’t perfect, but they weren’t like that, at least.”
Suppertime - “But photographs, no matter how marvelous they were, did not substitute for life.”
Rumpus Room - “Maybe a dream was mostly remembering and part wishing.”
Migration - “Gracetown was both her plague and her keeper.”
Caretaker - “Grayboy grinned and laughed at him by wagging his tail.”
Part III The Nayima Stories - it’s hard to believe these were written pre-pandemic (as was The Biographer from Part IV - whose main character predicted a pandemic). It was fun to read back to back stories set 40 years apart.
One Day Only - “Other people’s tastes were a burden.”
Attachment Disorder - “She wasn’t afraid to die, but living scared the hell out of her.”
Part IV Future Shock - I had only read Due’s horror before but really enjoyed these dystopian stories - the characters are so well established in just a few places.
Ghost Ship - “Maybe that was what had happened with the ghost ship, she thought. Maybe the passengers and crew had chosen the journey over their destination.”
Shopping Day - “Neighbors look out for neighbors.”
The Biographer - “Olivia Burns would have been an unlikely candidate for a Biographer if not for pure luck — if luck was the right word for her dystopian film about an oncoming global plague (which she had only meant as a metaphor for climate change and bigotry) that unfolded almost exactly the way her film had predicted it.”
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