Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine,
October 2nd, 1997
By James Hynes
Picador, $24
Scholastic horror stories—why hasn’t anybody thought of doing this before?
After all, what could be more terrifying than academia?
James
Hynes’ new collection, Publish and Perish, comprises three novellas,
each one scarier than a dissertation committee. The first story, “Queen of the
Jungle,” tells the chilling tale of Paul, Elizabeth, and their cat, Charlotte.
While Elizabeth is away at the University of Chicago, Paul has an affair with a
flaky communications major, and Charlotte does her best to foil his dastardly
plans for their family.
Sounds
silly, and it is, but Hynes’ hilarious vision of academic life makes it
stomachable. With Elizabeth schmoozing the tenure board at Chicago, Paul
flounders on his unpublishable dissertation, writing such chapters as
“Slouching Toward Minneapolis: William Butler Yeats, Mary Tyler Moore and the
Millennium.”
The
other two novellas, “99” and “Casting the Runes,” are successful in the same
ways as “Queen of the Jungle”—and to the same extent. They’re all tightly
written, funny, and scary as hell, but a horror story is still a horror story.
Each tale follows a pattern of rising creepiness, with the reader figuring out
if the protagonist deserves to survive, and then the climax passes final
judgment on him or her.
It’s
pretty straightforward stuff, but Hynes’ satires of academia can be
breathtaking—literally. If Perish and Publish shocks at all, with its
desperate doctoral candidates, disgraced theoreticians, and satanic
tenure-dinosaurs, it shocks with recognition.
—David Wiley
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