Mr. Death: Four Stories by Anne Moody

Mr. Death: Four Stories Reviews

• 
  Greg Kerestan

  This is, without a doubt, a VERY weird book. I've seen it described as a book for adults (likely) and as a children's book (odd but not entirely out of the realm of possibility). If it is indeed a children's book, it's among the strangest, bleakest and most haunting ever written, and one chock full of profanity, graphic violence, sex and trauma of all kinds.
  
  I have vivid memories of reading the first story, "Mr. Death" as a preschooler or kindergartener and having intense, unsettling dreams because of it; this is a deeply affecting, macabre Freudian nightmare of a story, a suicide note in the form of a dream. "The Cow" and "All Burnt Up" aren't quite as haunting, but their mix of the everyday prosaic and the sudden shift into tragedy and bloodshed makes them stand out from the average children's or young adult fare. But it's "Bobo" that probably packs the strongest punch save for the title story; Anne Moody keeps on delaying the reveal of exactly what kind of story this is going to be, until the final few paragraphs unveil a sudden shift in tone from children's story to graphic horror.
  
  The closest this comes to fitting any genre at all is probably Southern gothic, and Anne Moody is traveling in the same paths as Flannery O'Connor or Joyce Carole Oates here. But I'm not sure Oates ever wrote something as hauntingly symbolic as "Mr. Death," or O'Connor anything as almost leeringly nasty as "Bobo." Give it to your kid when they're four, and see how they turn out- I'm fine, right?
• 
  Keith zimmerman

  These four stories are concisely written, deeply affecting and sad. The title story reminded me a bit of Henry Dumas and his mingling of the supernatural with harsh realism, while The Cow reminded me of Guadalupe Nettel’s collection Natural Histories, in which the lives of people and the animals near to them have unsettling parallels. Moody was a contemporary of Dumas but wrote this collection years before Nettel’s, and I only point out the similarities as a sort of helpful/lazy descriptor, as i’m having trouble describing the stories myself.
• 
  Andrea Engle

  Strange book ... each story spotlights death, but also has something to say about love