Three Twisted Stories

Karin Slaughter

Random House UK, Cornerstone

Cornerstone Digital

ISBN: 9781473535329

Description:

From the hallucinatory noir story ‘Go Deep’ to the twisted short stories ‘Necessary Women’ and ‘Remmy Rothstein Toes the Line,’ this collection showcases the Sunday Times No. 1 bestselling author’s dark humour, limitless imagination, and masterly command of voice and character. (‘Go Deep’ and ‘Remmy Rothstein Toes the Line’ also available as single stories and ‘Necessary Women’ also available as part of a bundle with ‘The Mean Time’)

GO DEEP

Growing up dirt poor, Charlie Lam worked his ass off to make something of himself, no thanks to his deadbeat father or his long-suffering mother. And now a lot of people depend on Charlie: by his last count, sixty-eight employees at his Atlanta auto dealership, eleven shiftless brothers and sisters, an ungrateful wife, a spoiled daughter, a shameless girlfriend. Who could really blame him for wanting a little extra?

The arrangement is simple: Charlie picks up a suit from the dry cleaner’s. In the suit pocket is the name of a very important man. The next day, that man walks into the dealership, drives out in a new car, and Charlie gets a fat envelope full of cash. Everyone’s happy. No one gets hurt. So long as Charlie doesn’t cross his business partner. But with one twist of a knife, the unthinkable happens. And suddenly Charlie is in deeper trouble than he could have possibly imagined.

NECESSARY WOMEN

In a border town between Georgia and Alabama, in a three-room house made of cement block, a fourteen-year-old girl watches her mother die. Her father is a long-haul trucker, away for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. Her mother, with two menial jobs cleaning restrooms and working nights at the laundry, had been just thirty years old.

A week before she died, noticing her daughter getting attention from a boy, the girl’s mother warned her not to make the same mistakes she did. Now, her father tells her, she’s the woman of the house, and she must do all the necessary things the woman must do: the cleaning, the cooking, the laundry. But there’s a lot more to being a woman than fixing dinner and doing the wash. Her mother was right: She won’t end up like her – and she’ll do anything to prove it.

REMMY ROTHSTEIN TOES THE LINE

As an intrepid adjudicator of World Records, Mindy Patel has met lots of strange people in lots of strange places. But they’re no match for the Swampers of the Georgia bayou. Mindy has braved the oppressive August heat in search of Remmy Rothstein, who they call ‘The Cajun Jew’. If the photos are indeed accurate, she might be about to certify Remmy as the World Record Holder for Longest Tongue in the World . . . and maybe even the Widest!

First Mindy meets Remmy’s half-brother, Buell Rabinowitz, surely the world’s only one-legged, albino, Jewish African American. Then she makes the acquaintance of Remmy’s mother, a foul-mouthed old woman with an impressive beard. None of which prepares her for an eyeful of Remmy: a man who measures up to his singular reputation in ways that will change the course of Mindy’s life.

My View:

Karin Slaughter – you have a very dark sense of humour! At first I was quick to dismiss these short stories as a bit of twisted storytelling but the stories stay with you and as you mull them over you realise there is a lot of social commentary going on here. I love the strong women in these stories (even if some are a little messed up), I love your feminist bent Karin Slaughter – your stories say so much more than any Women’s Studies lectures I have attended.

And for the record – my favourite story here is Go Deep – this is putting the saying “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” very literally. I loved it.