Voodoo Heart: Stories

by Scott Snyder

Book Overview

Scott Snyder's protagonists inhabit a playfully deranged fictional world in which a Wall Street trader can find himself armed with a speargun, guarding a Dumpster outside a pawnshop in Florida; or an employee at Niagara Falls (his job: watching for jumpers) will take off in a car after a blimp in which his girlfriend has escaped. But in Snyder's wondrous imagination there's a thin membrane between the whimsical and the disturbing: the unlikely affair...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385338422
• ISBN13: 9780385338424
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

short stories from unexpected corners of modern life

Characters with unattractive professions from the corners of modern life -- girl who works as a wax museum doll during the day; boy who helps to save suicide jumpers on Niagara Falls; a ticket clerk at inflatable rubber house in amusement park in dreadful suburbia of Orlando; manager of a car wrecking yard; pilot from 1919 on a barnstorming trip -- serve to populate this collection of short stories. The plots are suspenseful and captivating, the dynamism of what is happening makes the reading unburdened, it also helps by building easy affinity to the struggles of the characters.

Amazing Story Collection

I read somewhere what John Lennon said about Elvis, that "before Elvis, there was nothing," and it's a quote that popped into my head after I read Scott Snyder's amazing story collection Voodoo Heart, and in the back of the book discovered his acknowledgment to the spirit of the King. What's great about this collection is, oddly enough, the same thing that was great about Elvis: the way that Snyder takes disparate elements and mixes them together to come up with a brand new kind of story. Elvis did it by putting Hank Williams together with gospel and blues. Snyder does it by concocting a melange of wild fantasy, wonderfully-timed comedy, and a cast of profoundly self-destructive, but ultimately sympathetic narrators. In the brilliant title story, when Jake and his long-time girlfriend move into their dream home, a kind of creeping darkness begins to intrude on the protagonist's heart, and he finds himself inexorably pulled toward a senseless betrayal. The subtext of the narrative speaks to the inner traveling salesman in all of us, the voice that masks our fear of commitment by always promising that just up the road there's an even better deal to be had. The pieces of Jake's life - the wrecking yard where he works, the prison he obsessively monitors from his bedroom window, the empty rooms in his house - echo his ruinous compulsion, and the resulting tragedy is a work of fiction that is as compelling as anything you're likely to read this year. And that's just one story. The book never lets up, and taken as a whole, it's nothing short of revelation. After I finished, I went right ahead and read it again. Maybe this is how all those folks in Memphis felt when they first heard "That's All Right Mama" on their radios and kept calling in to hear it again and again. That's how I feel about Scott Snyder's Voodoo Heart - more please!

Voodoo Is A Winner!!!

"Voodoo Heart" is aptly named. Voodoo, i.e., black magic of the soul, and while Scott Snyder's seven finely-told, diverse stories, are not black magic, they are of the soul and they are magic. No other writer I know could have parlayed these stories, seven hodgepodge tales of varied character-driven plots into a work of more readable pleasure as did Snyder. As one illustrious writer has already said, "Scott Snyder's "Voodoo Heart" just blew me away." It will the next reader also. This is Americana, by Scott Snyder, and it is wonderful reading for the lucky person who finds themselves in possession of this small book, which is so big of heart. Mr. Snyder delves into the depths of his characters with a pickaxe. He reveals the inner, hidden fears and hope and beliefs of these make-believe people, and after reading it, you might wonder how it was that he could write with so much understanding . . . about you! This, then, is the key to Snyder's success and storytelling. He doesn't just tell a story. No, indeed, he takes removes normal reasoning, puts his speculative reasoning hat on, sets his sights on sometimes darker thoughts of the normal man and woman and writes about it. "Voodoo Heart," debut fiction by Scott Snyder, is a must read.

Stunning Debut Worthy of Advance Praise

Scott Snyder's Voodoo Heart is the most consistently excellent story collection I've read in years. There's enough invention, narrative complexity, and stylistic nuance in each of these stories to carry a novel. An ambitious novel. But as far-ranging and joyously strange as the collection is, barreling us (once almost literally) from the nostalgia of a lookout post over World War I-era Niagara Falls to the grit of back lot security at a present-day Florida pawn shop, these stories are all of a kind. With each, Scott Snyder succeeds in mooring us to the familiar, and only somewhere along the way do we make the exhilarating discovery that what he has anchored us to is itself floating freely in the sky. This is a book to give to anyone who has all but given up on the short story, which has too often left readers to choose between the gallingly precious and the maddeningly safe. Here's to hoping Mr. Snyder's collection rejuvenates a stagnating form as much as it did at least one long-suffering reader.

Masterpiece

I first read Scott Snyder in 2002. The story was "Blue Yodel" in Zoetrope:All Story. Much like the man in that story, I started following the blimp of Scott's writing, eagerly picking up anything he'd written. In reading fiction, there are certain stories that stand out in my mind. And then there are some stories that make me stop and say, "Wow, this is why I read fiction in the first place." Scott's stories are like that. His characters have been described as dark, but they are also normal in a lot of ways. They are the kinds of people we have known or the kinds of people we could have easily become had things not gone a different way. When the narrator in "Voodoo Heart" says: "Some kind of mistake has been made; you shouldn't be here with them. But they're keeping you here, keeping you from your real life, which is happening somewhere else, with someone more attractive, someone wilder; not in this car, not here, in this line of people waiting for a traffic light, listening to the tick, tick, tick of your own turning signal. And so you hate this person all of a sudden. You want to smash them. Because their face is a trap. Their face is a cage. But then someone behind you hits their horn and breaks the spell." When the narrator says that, we can feel it, too. We have been there. The difference with Scott is that he can articulate it, that he isn't afraid to tell the truth about it. You will find truth in these stories. You will find intelligence. This book will make you take a second look at the world around you. You will know these dark, frustrated people because each of us has some of them on the inside. You will walk away from this book glad that you have had the chance to read it. It will remind you of the power of fiction and why stories will always be important. Scott has The Gift, folks. And VOODOO HEART is the real thing.