October 1, 2011
In Hrbek's story collection, which won this year's Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the monsters come from outside and within. They range from the title story's three-headed "Monster Zero"--a character in a post-World War II Japanese horror movie--and the maimed Hiroshima survivor who works on the movie set, to the sculpted replica of a drowned child created by the grieving father out of mud and a mail-order DNA footprint in a story called "Bereavement." These passionate, ambitious pieces take the reader in unexpected directions, with complex, shaped narratives that play with time and point of view in ways that enhance their impact. VERDICT Hrbek, also the winner of the James Jones First Novel Award for The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly, is a master at voices. He brings the reader into the universe of his troubled characters, whose imagined "monsters" and elaborate constructions of reality may not be so different from one's own. He is a writer to watch.--Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA
Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 1, 2011
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Hrbek's first collection subtly and masterfully merges the everyday and the mythic, poetic, futuristic, and seemingly impossible. His is a world in which children are born at exactly the wrong time, disappear or reappear at inopportune moments, die of accidental or strange causes, become convicted criminals, and confront their parents with explosives strapped to their chests. In the opening tale, two parents search the woods for their missing child, who either has a bizarre medical condition or is a remarkable creature. A teenager chronicles her twisted ideas of love, death, and sexuality, and reveals some disturbing family secrets in the archives of her video blog. A man reevaluates his marriage and the meaning of belief when he falls in love with a woman on a social media site who claims to be a mermaid. In stories filled with compassion, forgiveness, hope, and mystery, Hrbek (The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly, 1999) cunningly picks away at the core of humanity, revealing a species at once monstrous and miraculous.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)