Customer Reviews

The King of Limbo and Other Stories (Sewanee Writers' Series)

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This debut collection of short stories bodes well for the author's future and our reading pleasure, as Harun writes with precision, grace, and style. Nonetheless, taken as a whole, these ten tales seem oddly disjointed, vignettes gathered from hither and yon. Individually they are minute works of art, penned with perception and imagination.

"Lukudi," the opening story, features Natife, a Nigerian foreign exchange student and a recurring character in this collection. He is a "tall young man in a silky fuschia tracksuit, a gift from the aunts in Chicago," who is perplexed by the problems besetting 16-year-old Ally Reisch, she of "the pink rheumy eyes and frail blondness of an old woman on her way to bone." He relies upon his native upbringing, concluding that a blood sacrifice is needed, a chicken perhaps.

Miranda, a young woman who "set up housekeeping with one poor excuse after another; all sponges, heels, rats," is the focus of "Accidents." After driving her car into the front of a house she recall the pain she experienced when her baby was born prematurely, a baby who came "all in a rush, like a traveler without luggage or money or memory or desire."

Perhaps the most poignant story is "The Eighth Sleeper Of Ephesus" (winner of the Nelson Algren Award). We meet an older man, Frank Cocokowski who hears the voice of his dead wife, and finds surcease in writing letters to the editor of a newspaper.

Adrianne Harun proves herself a writer to watch.

- Gail Cooke

I'm not surprised to see this writer being written about in the big review newspapers such as The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Adrianne Harun's THE KING OF LIMBO is a sublime collection of stories, haunting and elegant at the same time. Filled with unusual people, the reader can't help but feel a connection with these characters, even in the most unlikely of circumstances.

I suspect we will be seeing great things from this writer for some time to come.

Adrianne Harun, author of The King of Limbo is quite possibly royalty herself. Harun is masterful in her craft, and the queen of seeing the world through various perspectives.
In this compilation of ten (20-or-so-paged) short stories, Harun provides deliberate outlooks from vastly contrasted characters and secondary characters. She captures the roles of a Nigerian exchange student and the troubled girl he perceives to be under the grips of an evil juju spell; a woman who has lost a child and the elderly couple whose house she drunkenly plows her car into; and in the title story, a six-year-old boy, his mother, and the same Nigerian exchange student -- only now, he's all grown up. In these brilliantly detailed vignettes, Harun lends her readers a pattern (which is sometimes formulaic, but nonetheless satisfying) of a rich anecdote or situation infused with cryptic feeling descriptions, followed by an explanation of such emotions, and then finished with a drastic -- or at least surprising -- concluding character action.
The best model of such development is in the book's first story, Lukudi. Natife, the aforementioned Nigerian exchange student, is working with a local girl as an extra credit project. He "pedal[s] hard on...[a] borrowed mountain bike..." down the street heading towards the stable at which she lives, to meet with her for the sixth of their peer counseling meetings. Natife is described as, "resplendent...this tall young man in a silky fuschia tracksuit." When meets Ally, the troubled girl that he has taken a friendly liking to, the reader can clearly see the images and events unfolding; but it is only after information of both character's pasts are revealed that the real issues of the story become apparent. The all-too-brief and all-too-painful piece ends with the girl's suicide and the residual morals that wealth does not equal happiness and we must strive to take care of our families and neighbors.
Harun's writing may be full of sensory images and sentiments, but she still leaves much to the reader's imagination. Rather than stating the young girl's fatal choice, Harun illustrates the moment in literary beauty, and through the peripheral and foreign view of Natife. She writes, "[Ally] cleared the fence and disappeared into the night sky, flickering like a star, but it was only when he heard the fire siren, the trucks tearing out down Old Cross Farm, that Natife caught Ally's cry, caught it and held it briefly in his shining bowl. Then he let her fly." The pain of the act is expressed, but in a more worldly manner; one in which most authors do not have the insight to express.
The stories are more juxtaposed with some common themes rather than woven together. There is the one recurring main character, and a few side characters whose names are repeated throughout the various stories. Most importantly, though, is the setting of Salish Bay, a place one character in The Eighth Sleeper of Ephesus (a slowly paced, magical story -- my favorite in the anthology) describes simply as, "God's country." The phantom northwest town is the home of hospitality and brotherhood, a place that advances with time but still stays true to its time-honored values. The heavenly town works as the setting for many of the dissimilar characters to recall what really matters in life. And with Harun's mastery of diverse subject matter, we can imagine that she has some idea as to what that may be.
Often while reading, I am enticed to create a relationship with a character based on personal similarities. But Adrianne Harun invites her readers to remember that reading is meant to be an adventure, that it is supposed to show us the unexplored. Her craftfulness over a group of zany and new protagonists encourage the reader to look beyond themselves and become more open-minded. This book has just limboed its way into my favorites collection.

This is the kind of book you dont want to put down and also the
kind you want to reread in case you missed something. It is a
neat book to put on your overnight guest's night table and the kind you want to recommend to others. Hat's off to this author;
she is not a run of the mill writer and has offered us stories
that are exciting and enjoyable.

I just stumbled across the paperback edition of these stories and couldn't be more pleased. The characters are not so unique as their perceptions and responses to the world around them. Harun takes ordinary feelings of pain and loneliness and spins them out in new patterns so that the stories are new and imaginative. Her style is fluid and mesmerizing and each story has-I wouldn't say a surprise ending-but a sort of twist on the character's reality; she doesn't hit you over the head with it but arrives there gracefully. Hard to put down and I definitely look forward to more.