Voodoo Heart [Paperback]

Scott Snyder (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 29, 2007

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 between a famous actress—in hiding after surgery—and a sporting goods salesman takes an ominous turn just as she begins to heal; an engaged couple’s relationship is fractured when one of them becomes obsessed with an inmate at the women’s prison next door.

Dark, funny, powerful, this debut collection underscores the remarkable gifts of a fiercely original young writer.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Francine ProseReading Scott Snyder's accomplished first story collection, Voodoo Heart, is a little like watching a magician pull rabbits out of a hat. No matter how many times you've seen the trick performed, you still marvel that someone has figured out not only how to do it but, more important, how to persuade the audience that no one has ever done it exactly that way before. Snyder's particular sleight of hand enables him to make the unlikely seem disturbingly familiar; he bends and stretches the laws of ordinary causality just enough so that, when his narratives snap back, there's a twang that reverberates after the final line. His protagonists are young romantics worried about the conflict between authenticity and adventurousness, torn between a self-protective longing for solitude and a longing for some deeper loyalty to another human being. What they mistake for life-changing passion may turn out to be simple—and terrible—misunderstanding, and a chance encounter may initiate a chain of events that will alter them forever. Many reside just outside odd or intentional communities (a boot camp for troubled teens, a summer haven for overweight kids) in which they take an almost anthropological interest. Others are in transit or in flight, reluctant to confront that what looked like a whimsical job opportunity or a brief vacation from ordinary life may in fact be a permanent dead end.In the title story, a young couple renovates an abandoned Florida mansion that borders on a women's prison—a proximity that intensifies the hero's most secret and desperate concerns about his true nature. In another tale, an equally conflicted young man meets a celebrity convalescing from drastic plastic surgery and becomes involved in a meteoric affair that flames out as her recovery changes his sense of what it means to be injured. In "Dumpster Tuesday," a guy who seems to have everything (or just enough) loses it all when his girlfriend leaves him for a brain-damaged, improbably charismatic country singer, and in "About Face," a trumpet player working at a juvenile detention center learns a painful lesson about illness, compassion and the mysteries of sex.Suffused with sly humor, sympathy and high spirits, the stories in Voodoo Heart are giddy with the thrill of discovering what can be done with words, what you can make happen on the page. The result is as irreducible and rewarding as making playing cards disappear or pulling gold coins out of thin air.Francine Prose's most recent book is Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. Her new book, Reading like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them will be published in the fall.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Snyder's delightfully deranged world contains characters living a circuslike existence. Crammed with acrobatic imaginings, the stories in this collection blur the line between the absurd and the profane. In one tale, a young man mistakenly crashes his two-seater plane into a farmhouse wedding and takes off with the bride; in another a loner captures the affection of a famous star whose face is a mass of bruises and cuts. "Blue Yodel" follows a bereft Niagara Falls "jumper" watch guard in hot pursuit of his fiancee, who has taken off in a blimp across the vast middle states. In "Happy Fish plus Coin," a trust-fund runaway meets an inspirational speaker who, like a cat with nine lives, keeps surviving horrendous accidents. Blimps, walkie-talkies, and metal detectors take on whimsical yet potent meaning. The dialogue is snappy, the characters sharp, and the story lines consuming, offering, at every turn, a new twist from the predictable, not unlike that of The Confessions of Max Tivoli (2004). Snyder is masterful, and the fact that he draws on uniquely American symbols, stories, and songs makes Voodoo Heart outstanding and unusual, and a spectacular debut. Emily Cook
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback; Reprint edition (May 29, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385338422
• ISBN-13: 978-0385338424
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #595,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Scott Snyder is one of comics' best young writers. His current works include BATMAN, AMERICAN VAMPIRE and SWAMP THING. He has also been published in Zoetrope, Tin House, One-Story, Epoch, Small Spiral Notebook, and other journals, and has a short story collection, Voodoo Heart, which was published by Dial Press. He teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence University and lives in New York with his wife, Jeanie, and his son, Jack Presley.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece May 30, 2006

By Paul C Chandler

Format:Hardcover

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Voodoo Is A Winner!!! July 26, 2006

By Jerry P. Bolton

Format:Hardcover

"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.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning Debut Worthy of Advance Praise June 7, 2006

By Vincent Snead

Format:Hardcover

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.