Well, SOME of it's Good... (The Jealousy Man short stories REVIEW)

I'm a fan of protein bars. You can grab one, throw it in the microwave for a few seconds (or not), and wolf it down—keeping your blood sugar up and the hangries at bay—in a couple minutes, flat.

Short stories, to me, are the protein bars of the reading world. When life is too crazypants to devote (or even have) the time and concentration a novel requires, a collection of such is nice to have on hand; select a quickie, dive into it on your lunch hour, Uber ride, or when you crawl into bed but aren’t quiiiite sleepy enough to turn your brain off, and voila, you've entertained your brain. 


No, a short story isn’t my favorite thing to read… but sometimes, it's a good option. (And, in some cases--think Stephen King, or Edgar Allen Poe--it can even be a brilliant art form, letting an amazing tale unfold in an almost-unbelievably short space.)


So, when I saw that Norwegian mystery/thriller writer Jo Nesbø had a new book of shorts out—around the busy holiday season, no less—it seemed like a cool thing for me to have on hand.

__________


The Jealousy Man is divided into two sections—entitled “Jealousy” and “Power”—each of which contains several stories of varying, abbreviated lengths. (Interesting to structure the book thusly, giving a hint as to the stories’ themes.) 


Things started off quite well for me, with “London”, a tight little tale of two strangers on a plane (and quite possibly my fave out of the entire book). “The Jealousy Man”, which followed, was considerably longer, but had a really interesting premise—a detective who specialized in cases involving jealousy as a motive--and some neat twists.


Five more tales rounded out the “Jealousy” section… each holding my interest somewhat, but none really compelling me to rush through. 


So, after (finally) finishing that first section--which had started so promisingly but wound up less-than-compellingly--it took me at least a week to even consider picking the book back up. <sigh> This didn’t bode well, I thought.


When I finally convinced myself to tackle the second section—“Power”—my hopes went up again, though, because the lead story there—the dystopian “Rat Island”—had a very au courant feel, set in a world facing an epic pandemic. (It dragged on a bit in places, but overall, was a really interesting read. Yay!)


Unfortunately, that same story also turned out to be the high point of the second section; the remainder of the tales in “Power” were overlong, not engaging, and just not enjoyable. [Imagine a very-sad emoji face here, because that's how I felt.]

__________


Coming from an author whose full-length thrillers I’ve always really enjoyed, The Jealousy Man and Other Stories was, on the whole, a big disappointment for me. (So much so, in fact, that it took me a full month to even pick up a different book, after I’d finished it… something that NEVER happens to me.)


Are there short stories worth reading in The Jealousy Man? Yes, there are (and of course you, dear reader, may feel entirely differently to how I felt about them, anyway). For me, though, this collection was akin to unwrapping a protein bar… only to find out that two-thirds of it had gone bad.


~GlamKitty

Comments

Post a Comment

No ads or shilling, please. And always, always be polite.

Popular posts from this blog

Prowling the Streets in Search of Justice: A SuperHero is Born

Image
Growing up, I idolized Wonder Woman. She had it all--awesome strength and beauty, intelligence and kindness. To me, she was female perfection. Ever practical, I knew I’d never achieve that ideal (she was just fantasy, after all), but following her tireless quest to rid the world of evil and replace it with love and peace allowed me to envision a place and time in which women enjoyed real power and respect (and could fix problems without a lot of senseless bloodshed). It's never all about thrilling feats of derring-do, of course.  There’s a bit of melancholy attached to any superhero story too-- sometimes a sense of loss, and always feelings of loneliness. Nothing comes without a price.  Raymond Benson explores what it would be like to become an all-too-human superhero in his new book, The Black Stiletto . ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ Martin Talbot is a just a regular Joe. Ordinary-looking, middle-aged, and divorced (with shared custody of an only daughter), he’s not the sort to inspire...
Read more

Werewolves in London? Try Bloodsuckers Down Under (Aussie urban fantasy/thriller REVIEW)

Image
Aside from a few dozen or so songs--the unremittingly-cheery sort of dreck I can only charitably term “uplifting”--there seems to be something of a universal consensus that life can be pretty awful. Sound overly harsh? Let’s look to some experts then, shall we? Consider that the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths is that “life means suffering”. Think back to John Hobbes, who concluded in his 1651 book Leviathan that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. “ Of course, if you prefer your proof to be of the less-erudite variety, there’s always that late-20th-century classic, “Life sucks, and then you die”. (Lacks a bit in the eloquence department, but it gets the same point across, in inimical Bill-&-Ted fashion.) With such depressing thoughts bearing down on us like so many dark, angry stormclouds--and the fact that most of us have just seen too much bad to fall for the false promises in those sappy songs--it's no wonder a lot of people look for ways to escape t...
Read more

A Nightmare Without End: Abduction & the Long Road Back

Image
Danger takes many forms. Most of us--once we’ve become rather uncomfortably aware of our own mortality--make an effort to take at least a few precautions to ward ourselves from some of the dangers we face.  At a bare minimum, we look both ways before crossing the street. We inoculate ourselves against deadly diseases. We bolt our doors and lock our windows to all the scary things (and bad people) that go bump in the night. We fasten our seat belts before setting out on the roadways in our little hunks of metal (although statistics show that a lot more of us could stand to be doing that ). Taking such measures is empowering; we’re proactively doing something to safeguard ourselves. So many other things, of course, are completely outside the realm of our control. We’re unable to prevent cancers or illnesses that we’re genetically predisposed to getting. We’re at the whims of Mother Nature when it comes to floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and such. We can’t predict if a random stran...
Read more