Voodoo Heart [Paperback]

Scott Snyder’s protagonists inhabit a playfully deranged fictional world in which a Wall Street trader can find himself armed with a speargun, guarding a Dumpster outside a pawnshop in Florida; or an employee at Niagara Falls (his job: watching for jumpers) will take off in a car after a blimp in which his girlfriend has escaped. But in Snyder’s wondrous imagination there’s a thin membrane between the whimsical and the disturbing: the unlikely affair between a famous actress—in hiding after surgery—and a sporting goods salesman takes an ominous turn just as she begins to heal; an engaged couple’s relationship is fractured when one of them becomes obsessed with an inmate at the women’s prison next door.

Dark, funny, powerful, this debut collection underscores the remarkable gifts of a fiercely original young writer.“Scott Snyder'sVoodoo Heartjust blew me away. These dispatches from disaffected but strangely likeable American oddities have much the same effect as good American roots music: their simplicity is deceptive, their emotional power considerable. And at some point between the mystery-blimp ofBlue Yodeland the World War I-era Curtis Jenny ofThe Star Attraction of 1919, you may discover that Snyder's plain folks have stolen your heart. I think what impressed me most about these stories—even the ones in which terrible things happen—was their warmth and humanity. Even when his characters are at their worst, Scott Snyder never abandons them. These are stories that welcome the reader in, and fully reward his interest. Sometimes horrifying, often absurd, full of characters afraid to commit (and who sometimes commit anyway), this is a debut worthy of T. Coraghessan Boyle'sIf The River Was Whiskey. I couldn't put it down."—Stephen King

"The dialogue is snappy, the characters sharp, and the story lines consuming...Snyder is masterful, and the fact thatl“+