Customer Reviews

Coal Miner's Holiday: Stories

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Coal Miner's Holiday by Kiki Delancey is a book of short stories that more closely resembles poetry. She writes a variety of different types of stories with the constant being her use of vivid metaphorical descriptions. The first story is told from the perspective of the main character's thought processes. The accuracy with which DeLancey puts the character's thoughts into writing creates an interesting effect since we rarely think with the same focused coherence that we use to tell stories. The result is that we read two stories at once, what is physically happening and what the character thinks is happening.
Most of the stories in Coal Miner's Holiday are not long narratives involving fantastic or complex plots. Rather they could be compared to snap shot portraits of moments that capture an emotion or mood. These stories are of the colorful characters and personality quirks that arise to make life interesting in small towns of working folks where there is nothing better to do. The artistry the author displays in expressing the nuances of these moments has the quality of works you might find in photographs hanging on fancy museum walls.

With vivid characters and some gallows humor, Kiki Delancey's stories -- set mostly in run down and dying coal mining towns -- introduce the reader to familiar and mysterious human longings. In the hilariously punchlined story *What The Hell* a guy and his old high school sweetheart engage in a long running and doomed from the start attempt to consumate what had never been, even though by the time they can actually find the time to "get together" the woman is 6 months pregnant and the baby in the oven is an active little bugger. The last line (I won't ruin it here) made me roar with laughter. I mean, it's irony or whatever it was was just too good, too funny.

A story in the collection that affected me in quite an opposite way was *Washed,* wherein the simple act of a mother washing her little children is tranformed into a deeply symbolic and sacred act of final devotion and letting go. It's like slap-you-in-the- face sobering and austerely beautiful.

There are so many great stories here that it's hard to choose which ones to include here in this 1000 word max review. There's the Mississipi Review Best Story of the Year (2000 I think) prize winner "The Mystery of George Jones" that portrays a strange boy, wise beyond his years, whose hero worship of George Jones goes way beyond the normal fan club dues and autographed photos of the average rabid fan. Anyway. He emulates the country singer to make himself forget the mundane ordinariness of his life, as kind of a poultice from having to face *it.* It's a great story. And then there's the creepy basket case of the collection's first story *I Loved the Squire* who, it is made clear, is not all there. But whose heart-felt appreciation of beauty (even if it is a floating girl he just knifed) makes the reader sympathize with this murderer somehow. He reminded me of the murderous necrophiliac in Cormac McCarthy's *Child of God.* And the story *Two Strippers* is short and sweet and packs a real punch along the same lines as *Mystery of GJ* in that it's pov character is striving to give order and beauty to an austere world that offers no outward signs of either.

And there are loads more I haven't even touched on. The characters shine and the settings are depressing. The fantastic dynamic in most of these stories is the character's often futile but dogged attempts to transcend their circumstances and find some diamonds in the pile of coal that life has dealt them.

I've just finished COAL MINER'S HOLIDAY after delaying the ending for a few months. I hated to see this excursion end. Kiki DeLancey's style of writing is unique and engaging. She introduces the reader to unknown worlds of labor, strife and the bowels of the earth in one large sweep of pure unadulterated reality. This is a world of coal miners, a world unavailable to the average reader. Their passions and disappointments, their pleasures and personal endeavors are unlike those of the average citizen. I enjoy new experiences, delving into lives that are remote from my journey and learning something new when I read a book and Kiki provides all of these things with vigor and charm. Her stories engage the reader, her characters captivate the reader, and her themes linger long after leaving this particular road. I cannot say that I preferred one short piece over another, or one character more than another, but I can say that I'll be first in line when her next book arrives.

When I began reading the first story in Coal Miner's Holiday, I Loved the Squire, I thought of Hemmingway, mostly because of the stark and sometimes choppy prose. I'm not a huge Hemmingway fan, so I had my reservations, but by the end of the story, I found myself marveling. Delancey is a unique voice, and her stories stick in the mind. As is often the case in good writing, their complexity is belied by the simplicity of their language. It isn't the stuff of MFA programs; it's real, often rough, sometimes down-and-dirty.

These are not all stories about coal miners, although they are set in midwestern coal country. Some, like the trilogy bracketed under the heading "Swingtime" and the marvelous little gem, "Story of the Bread" (My personal favorite; I believe it should be required reading for EVERYONE, period), spring from the author's Greek background. Delancey jumps back and forth in time--"The Seven Pearls," for example, delivers us an oddball prophet in the Hippie age, while Dinger and Blacker is set in and around a speakeasy.

This is great stuff. Buy, enjoy, give it to someone who appreciates fine, quirky writing and very human characters.

Susan O'Neill
Author, Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam