Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse - by Heidi Bell (Paperback)

About the Book

"Two sisters play an unsettling game; a child witnesses a casually violent neighborhood ritual; an up-and-coming young professional is disturbed by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings; a woman's ideal life unfolds in the pages of a mail-order catalog. The Midwestern men and women, girls and boys who populate Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse and Other Stories are united by a yearning-for answers or simply for relief-that is often twisted by their baser impulses. With lyricism, humor both dark and playful, and brutal clarity, Heidi Bell approaches reality sideways in her sensational debut collection."--

Book Synopsis

Two sisters play an unsettling game; a child witnesses a casually violent neighborhood ritual; an up-and-coming young professional is disturbed by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings; a woman's ideal life unfolds in the pages of a mail-order catalog. The Midwestern men and women, girls and boys who populate Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse and Other Stories are united by a yearning-for answers or simply for relief-that is often twisted by their baser impulses. With lyricism, humor both dark and playful, and brutal clarity, Heidi Bell approaches reality sideways in her sensational debut collection.

Review Quotes

"With her mix of light and dark, lovable and unlikable characters, and hope and regret, Bell's collection is part Neil Gaiman and part Donald Barthelme, with a touch of Joyce Carol Oates."

-Booklist, starred review

"A dark seen-it-all humor animates Heidi Bell's portraits of women and men of the American urban Midwest-she knows their frowsy self-esteem, their good-natured shame at where they've ended up, their excuses, and that simmering envy of those who have it easy that only rarely connects to a pathway out of their own bad situations. Bell knows American women and men, and she knows her way around the American language, from its jazzy and cornucopial top to its dank, bump-and-grind bottom. It seems there's nothing that Heidi Bell can't do, with her earthy wit and cunning imagination, encyclopedic resources of language, and deft mastery of literary forms, from short-short to classic long to modal in-between. Most of her stories center on the so-called real world that makes us laugh and wince, and yet a golden thread of magic, shape-shifting, and light along the edges is also at play in these stories, often allowing a glimpse of another world altogether, the richer universe where stories are born. This is a versatile, highly readable collection."

-Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule, winner of the National Book Award

"An exquisite, achingly rendered collection of stories. Heidi Bell's recipe is part fairy tale, part biting social commentary-hopelessly romantic with a sharp edge. Though the book is raucously funny, Bell knows how difficult life is-and how incompetent most decent people feel as they navigate it-and she pushes her characters to their limits, because the way through is the hard way."

-Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of The Waters and American Salvage, finalist for the National Book Award

"Heidi Bell is one of our great unsung writers. Let these stories sing to you. Listen to their music and you will fall under their spell as I did."

-Matthew Salesses, author of The Sense of Wonder

"A fierce and funny collection from a highly original and enchanting sensibility. Bell's stories X-ray our psyches in the way fairy tales do-revealing essential motivations while also shining a brilliant light on the marvelous, the disturbing, the uncanny. Her hardscrabble women and broken men fight on, often despite having one hand tied behind their backs by wrenching backstories. Beauty and yearning blend with terror and depravity in these artfully written pages."

-Andy Mozina, author of Tandem