The King Is Dead

December 5, 2022
This visionary and unsettling collection from Tevis (The Queen’s Gambit), who died in 1984, features the dystopian science fiction and tales of pool hall hustlers known to the author’s readers, and contains “outdated cultural representations and language,” as acknowledged in a publisher’s note. An Oedipal ickiness suffuses three transgressive linked stories, “A Visit from Mother,” “Daddy,” and “Sitting in Limbo,” in which a man named Barney hosts the ghosts of his parents. In the poignant “The Apotheosis of Myra,” a woman on the planet Belsin is murdered by her husband and comes back to life as the planet itself, speaking through the grass to exact her revenge. In “Echo,” set in the 47th century, a man confronts his own self, resurrected from the 20th century, in a disturbing way. The sexualized female characters and misogyny of the protagonists, however, doesn’t hold up as shock value, assuming it ever did (“Why didn’t you shut her up? Why didn’t you hit her in the face?” Barney says to his father, about his mother, in “Daddy” ). Tevis was a dynamic craftsman and often keen student of character, as demonstrated in these stories, though many readers will find these qualities difficult to appreciate given the context. This is for diehards only.