Anya Johanna DeNiroReseñas

It is a post-apocalyptic world where modern electrical devices stop working, invaders on horseback wielding swords and axes are invading South, the Empire is fighting North, and large corporations have embraced the new world order by selling their workforce as slave labor. Macy and her family find themselves in the middle of this, and end up traveling south on the Mississippi to try and find a new life.

This world was pretty fascinating, but there was a distinct lack of real plot during the first half of the book when the Palmers were traveling on the river. It was interesting but was little more than a montage of all the weird shit that exists in the world now. In Part II, however, I really got sucked into the story and practically read the second half of the book straight through.

Because the story is told from the POV of an ordinary girl, you never really know WHY things are happening, which was mildly frustrating but realistic. DeNiro interjects a short excerpt from a document between each chapter to give more background to the story, which I thought was nicely done (even if the formatting and my Sony Reader did not get along).

I didn't like Macy, the POV character, at the beginning. She felt too passive -- which was symbolized by the river she was traveling on, carrying her wherever. But in Part II, she starts taking actions on her own and having to think for herself and I found myself liking her more.½

I had mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I appreciate the absurdity of DeNiro's imagined post-apocalyptic United States, and he takes a big risk by refusing to explain any of it. That makes sense as the characters in the novel would have no opportunity to even begin to understand what was happening to their world beyond the visible results.

This is ultimately a story of a family that is being torn apart, and of a teenage girl's attempt to save her brother, despite how he has slighted her. The relationships within the family are well written, and you feel for the protagonist and her family. However, the rest of the characters seem to suffer as a result. I can't put my finger on why, since their motivations are clearly outlined in the text, some of the other characters struck me as plot puppets as opposed to having their own motivations, especially as they begin to align with Macy. This may have less to do with the characters than it does with my own irritation at the ending, which was far too pat given the circumstances.

One other note, there is plenty of dialogue in this novel, but absolutely none of it is enclosed in quotation marks. This was clearly a stylistic choice, and it is extremely distracting, especially as you will often be halfway through a sentence before you realize it is dialogue and then you have to go back and start reading it again. It was irritating in the extreme, and even my fiancé (who was peeking at it over my shoulder) remarked on how confusing that was.

Normally, I would give a book of this quality about three stars, but the quotation mark issue described above made it so frustrating an experience to read that I have to knock it down to two. If you don't think that issue would bother you, then you have a quick three-star read (enjoyable, but not amazing) ahead of you.

This book is not something I would typically read, but it was interesting, well written and had a great cover. Macy's junior year of high school, the world falls apart; technology stops working, ancient invaders come and the world seems to be reshaping itself. Macy's family tries to stay together and work toward some kind of future, but in actuality it is falling apart. The novel chronicles their times with a focus on Macy in particular. Why the world fell apart is never explained, but the struggle that Macy's family faces to keep their inner world together is so interesting that it's not important to know why the world fell apart.

This book is not something I would typically read, but it was interesting, well written and had a great cover. Macy's junior year of high school, the world falls apart; technology stops working, ancient invaders come and the world seems to be reshaping itself. Macy's family tries to stay together and work toward some kind of future, but in actuality it is falling apart. The novel chronicles their times with a focus on Macy in particular. Why the world fell apart is never explained, but the struggle that Macy's family faces to keep their inner world together is so interesting that it's not important to know why the world fell apart.

This book is not something I would typically read, but it was interesting, well written and had a great cover. Macy's junior year of high school, the world falls apart; technology stops working, ancient invaders come and the world seems to be reshaping itself. Macy's family tries to stay together and work toward some kind of future, but in actuality it is falling apart. The novel chronicles their times with a focus on Macy in particular. Why the world fell apart is never explained, but the struggle that Macy's family faces to keep their inner world together is so interesting that it's not important to know why the world fell apart.

This book is not something I would typically read, but it was interesting, well written and had a great cover. Macy's junior year of high school, the world falls apart; technology stops working, ancient invaders come and the world seems to be reshaping itself. Macy's family tries to stay together and work toward some kind of future, but in actuality it is falling apart. The novel chronicles their times with a focus on Macy in particular. Why the world fell apart is never explained, but the struggle that Macy's family faces to keep their inner world together is so interesting that it's not important to know why the world fell apart.

Tyrannia is difficult to characterize, each story is weird but weird in its own individual way. One story features young people who break into houses to play music and dance. Another has angel-like beings who guard a portal to between this world and another. In a third story, a group of three kidnap a professor and prepare to torture him according to guidance that he helped author for rendition of enemy combatants. Many end without resolution so the reader is left hanging, to imagine what the final scenes would be.

This collection of stories from Alan DeNiro proved to be a frustratingly mixed bag. There were a few strong entries, but they were mixed in with far too many experiments in style that seemed overly obtuse, meandering, or just too pointless to care about. Laboring through so many of the latter frustrated me enough to make me leery of seeking out DeNiro’s stories in the future. Which is a shame, because when the author has his storytelling hat situated firmly and confidently on his head, his wonderfully weird characters and settings—which at times approach George Saunders levels of surreal worldbuilding—actually help the stories become even more fully realized and rewarding. Three that stood out were “The Philip Sidney Game,” “Highly Responsive to Prayers,” and “The Wildfires of Antarctica.” The everpresent layers of weirdness are certainly evident in all of these stories, but in each of them the weirdness successfully adds to rather than distracts from the storytelling.½

This is an odd book, but it isn't one of those odd books that you can tell the author was trying to make it an odd book. It's more like a bad acid trip in fiction form. My only reservation is the use of the word 'startled'. You could make a drinking game on the use of the word in the book.

A few were intriguing: Cudgel Springs, Plight of the Sycophant, Dancing in a House, and Highly Responsive to Prayers. The vast remainder were either disturbing in a scattered way - decent build up with a confusing, weak climax - or just plain fell flat. Often, the only reason I finished a story was the obligation of giving it a fair review. Oh, the horror.

I agree with the reviewer who didn't love Tyrannia but kept reading. DeNiro's fresh perspective is immediately engaging, and unsupported details that bothered other reviewers just gave me the impression of glimpsing unfamiliar but fully developed worlds.

However, I was surprised when an early story turned to graphic kidnapping and torture. I don't like horror and DeNiro's creativity and vivid descriptions are effective. The collection is generally darker and more dystopian than the empowering subversion I expected.

Finally, I like irreverent typesetting, but Tyrannia's liberties are confusing and distract from the content.

DeNiro's unusual and sometimes disturbing stories will attract a small, enthusiastic fan base. I think Tyrannia is interesting, but not a keeper.

DeNiro cross-breeds the charged ambience of Philip Dick and Bill Burroughs, with Ballard, Pynchon and Cronenberg thrown into the mix. What emerges in Tyrannia is a unique dystopian future that is bleak, surreal, and yet not quite improbable.

The title story is a mobius strip that brings a new meaning to the term “life after death”.

There is a subterranean horror (metaphorically perhaps?) in “A Rendition” — a story about three students kidnapping a professor who helped draft the torture memos used in the War on Terror.

America is a radioactive wasteland in ‘The Warp and the Woof” where a writer and his agent play out an historic relationship in a feral new world.

A wild 21st century Dickian mind melter!

I'm trying to decide what to say about this collection.

I'll start by confessing that I didn't love TYRANNIA, but I couldn't stop reading it. DeNiro's stories are (to put it mildly) weird, and reading them requires concentration and may leave you exhausted. Some of the stories were standouts for me, and I want DeNiro to expand them into novels. "(*_*?) ~~~~ (-_-): The Warp and the Woof" (the title gives you a clue to the weirdness), "Dancing in a House," "The Flowering Ape," "The Wildfires of Antarctica," and "The Philip Sidney Game" all kept me enthralled. However, some of the stories are so bizarre, I couldn't grasp the meaning or even the plot line, ("Walking Stick Fires," for example) and some were just disappointing, like "A Rendition."

I can't think of a single friend to whom I will recommend this collection. That said, there are people out there who will love this, I'm sure of it. As with all short stories collections, I found it to be uneven. DeNiro has skill; I just want a bit more focus.

One reviewer points out that DeNiro's stories are characterized by "youthful exuberance." I think that is a fair description though I would add another quality of youth besides exuberance — confusion. Whether it is his struggle to develop meaningful links between the two eras he straddles in one story or his unwillingness to commit to any judgement of his character's actions in another, DeNiro feels as though he is not certain which side he should take. The people who inhabit these stories illicit sympathy in one instance and scorn in another. Meanwhile, DeNiro's lack of direction merely exhaust the reader.

I went into this book having been a big fan of Alan DeNiro's previous short story collection, "Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead." This collection did not disappoint. Many of the details in the stories are a bit ridiculous -- details, whether factual or fictional, frequently are -- but in every story I was able to identify some emotional core that resonated strongly with me. Elements of horror, fantasy, and science fiction mingle freely and enthusiastically, and DeNiro seems to cultivate his ambiguous endings like they were a breed of rare flower. Which does tend to give the stories the feeling of a particularly vivid dream, something which, as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing. Highlights include the stories "(*_*?)~~~~(-_-):TheWarpandtheWoof" and "The Flowering Ape," the latter being a particularly touching meditation on being different and growing older. This book may not be for everyone, but this is exactly the sort of short story collection that I would like to read more often.½

When I was in college, the worst criticism the professor could (and frequently did) give us was "self-indulgent." I never really understood what was meant by this until now. Alan De Niro's collection of short stories is truly self-indulgent. They are filled with characters named "Fitch" and "Ambercrombie" or local settings such as the Apple Valley Zoo where the monorail goes in a loop no faster than 5 miles an hour but somehow has become the main means of transportation, tazers that wound people for days -- all details from stories that are far more serious than these distractions would imply. The stories are best described as horror stories, many centering on the theme of torture. They vary wildly in quality. The first one offended me. It reminded me very much of Latin American stories about the disappeared, yet it had a mocking tongue-in-cheek tone. It didn't work on any level. It wasn't chilling. It wasn't enlightening. It wasn't funny. The next, "Rendition," is one of the more successful pieces in the book. It fleshes out the first story with some names, a setting, and some motives. Hah! This means the first story was lacking in names, setting and motives. I see other people have beaten me to giving this collection a 2 star rating. I have to agree. You're on your own if you decide to read this.

I'll be honest.

I couldn't read much of the stories. It felt raw, exuberant, immediate, and poorly written - at least communicated. The author's writing style was not on par with my expectations and desired flow. I was more interested in reading a better written, a tightly structured piece of writing than the writing itself.

The stories in Tyrannia have a certain youthful exuberance that's hard to ignore. For much of the time, though, I feel as if I'm reading someone's dreams scribbled down in the middle of a sweaty scary night. Night sweats...nightmares. Not necessarily a bad thing to face down one's demons, personal and global, but these particular stories could use just a little more finesse.

Art and the future just didn't fly well for me here.½

A story about problems with art in the future. Interestingly creepy.

Some of these shorts blew me away. "Our Byzantium" "Cuttlefish" and "Salting the map" are some of my favorite things I've read this year. Unfortunately, not all the stories were of the same caliber, so it was a very rollercoaster experience.

Fairytale-like conflict between humans and alien 'Wolves', mixing old and new tech.

Total Oblivion, More or Less, is just about the strangest fantasy I’ve ever read – and I’ve been reading fantasy and weird fiction for more than 45 years.

Imagine waking up one day to find that Scythian horsemen have invaded your hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. Their sworn enemy, the Empire, has set up shop further down the Mississippi River. They’re in a constant state of war, and you’re in the middle of it. There’s a plague sweeping through the country; the buboes that victims get have pictures in them. Wasps are somehow involved with the plague, but it’s not clear whether they’re attracted to plague victims or spreaders of the plague; one thing that is clear is that a victim more or less turns to the papery consistency of a wasp’s nest if stung.

Safe to say that you wouldn’t have the faintest idea what the heck is going on:

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things started turning wrong. Bad things were happening in the world, like glaciers melting and terrorists blowing up rail stations, but even though these were areas of concern, we weren’t freaking out on a minute-to-minute basis because of them. We though we were safe for a long time. Everything was normal….

While school was finishing up, we began to hear reports, on the edges of our hearing, about a plague and the armed men following in its wake. Up north, and in the Dakotas. We expected someone to tell us what to do about it. No one did.

And so it begins. An announcement comes across the radio that the post office is closing for inventory. Then the internet stops working, and no one answers at the office of the internet provider. Cell phones gradually stop working. Planes no longer fly over. And then, one day, the history teacher starts speaking in a language that no one understands, harsh and guttural; even she is confused by it.

Change continues to unfold at a tremendous rate. Soon money is useless and food is hard to come by. Macy, the narrator, is sixteen years old when the book opens, and it’s starting to look like the plans she had for her life aren’t going to work out. Soon she and her family – an older sister, Sophia, a younger, rather wild brother, Ciaran, and her parents, Grace and Carson, are aboard the Prairie Chicken, traveling down river to St. Louis, where Carson is expecting to be able to take up a new position as a professor of astronomy at a local university. This doesn’t seem like an entirely realistic plan, but what else are they going to do?

The weirdnesses in the book steadily multiply. One of the oddest things that have changed the most seem nonetheless to have always been in their new configuratons. Nueva Roma, for instance, is made up of stone skyscrapers that are ancient; the New Orleans it seems to have replaced might as well never have been.

The book covers roughly a year of changes, one in which Macy seems to come into her own self, to know how she feels about her family and to have an idea of how she’s going to make it in this new world. DeNiro keeps a tight focus on Macy’s personal story, despite interludes between chapters that sometimes fill in blanks, and sometimes further define non-viewpoint characters. That means we never learn how this change came to be, whether the changes have stopped and this new world is permanent, or where the Scythians and the Empire came from. It’s all a mystery to us as much as it is to Macy, and that seems to be pretty much the point.

As compelling a read as Total Oblivion is, it is not totally successful. DeNiro occasionally pours on the weird just for the sake of puzzling his readers ever further. Not everything meshes as well as it should. People seem to adjust with astonishing ease to the change of everything in their lives, and to find new livelihoods despite it all. And if a reader fails to suspend disbelief for so much as an instant, imagining what would really happen if technology simply failed and people were thrown into a wholly new world like this, without supermarkets, medical insurance and communications systems, everything falls apart. Where is the death and suffering? By no means are they completely absent from this book, but neither are they as present as they ought to be in a post-apocalyptic world.

Perhaps that simply isn’t DeNiro’s project here. He just wants to tell a story about a world where everything and everyone changes, and what life along the Mississippi would be like as a result. And that he does, and does well. Just keep reading to find out what happens to Macy and her family and don’t think about the apocalypse or its likely consequences, and you’ll have a great time.

It is books of this ilk that put me off magical realism. It seems all to often to be an opportunity for lazy character resolution. The reader to expected to not notice/accept the totally unconvincing resolution of character interactions because, after all, this is a book of magical realism where nothing else made sense, so why should this?
And what I found most unbelievable about this book was not the magical changes that had taken place in the United States, rather that the characters in the book turned out not be recognizable as human beings. They reacted with neither the joy nor the pain, the curiosity nor the anger that one would expect human beings to feel in the situations they faced.