I loved this collection! I really enjoyed the writing style and the explorations of childhood/adolescence, sexuality, and queerness.

Thank you Netgalley, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and Kimberly King Parsons for free e-ARC in return of my honest review.

Black Light is a collection of stories about different parts of life - marriage, childhood, addiction, first love. However, it is not the regular sweet stories that one might expect. It shows you life like a meat steak - you don't know how it's done until you cut it. When you cut this one, it is completely raw - darkest desires and magic illusions.

It is very unexpected approach, very modern and on edge. Every story gives only a stroke of a picture to a reader, only a glimpse of a life of these particular characters, and then the reader can imagine the rest if wants. Unique, new story-telling.

I personally was not a fan, at the same time I do appreciate the rawness and the newness of Parsons story-telling.

I always want to love short stories more than I do, so imagine my surprise when I found myself immensely enjoying Kimberly King Parsons' critically-acclaimed collection of stories titled Black Light. Black Light, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award, is a dark and gritty collection of vignettes, which peeks into the hidden sides of ordinary, yet extraordinary people's lives. Touching on topics such as friendship, first love, siblings, marriage, and addiction, Parsons adds a compelling touch of je ne sais quoi to her stories, which makes them all the more irresistible.

Set in Texas, the stories in Black Light pull back the curtain on life and expose everything that everyone has ever been afraid to show the world. There is no shame splashed across these pages - Parsons' characters put themselves out there, and you may just see a little of yourself lurking within the men, women, and children of these stories. Black Light is an intriguing, thought-provoking read that posses both bark and bite. This short story collection is recommended to lovers of literary fiction and atmospheric southern fiction.

I loved these short stories! They're cutting and depressing and - in some of them - incredibly relatable.

I'm not sure what it is with contemporary short story collections from the North American Anglosphere, but I often feel deflated/bored. This has received critical acclaim and good reviews and is now on the Tournament of Books longlist. There's no denying that King Parsons can write a perfect sentence. However, despite the raw, gritty atmosphere and focus on people on the margins, it still came off like a cool, nonchalant, workshopped-to-death collection that left me feeling empty.

Black Light is a collection of short stories that is raw and deep. The author dives into difficult subjects that are tough to face head on but Parsons doesn't shy away form them. I wasn't in love with every story but overall, I thought this collection worked well together.
Recommend for those who enjoy collections of short stories.

#BlackLight #NetGalley #KnopfDoubledayPublishingGroup #Vintage

Parsons peers into the darkness that lies beneath the human condition in a set of mercilessly human stories ranging from the burn of first love to the bane of obsession to the sleights of marital bliss — I absorbed every page of this collection.

I don't know why I keep picking up books of short stories when my thoughts on them are always "I wish these stories went somewhere and weren't just vignettes".

Having said that, the vibe of these stories is so unique that they do keep you wanting to read on to the next one. They're mostly short enough that you can read one or two in a quick five minute break, and I also found them (dark, twisted) palate cleansers in between other books.

Recommended for fans of short story collections.

Review posted to Goodreads. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a brilliantly written collection of stories that focus on human emotions and desires. I love how raw the writing is, as the author's words stay with the reader long after they finish each story.

EXCERPT: I'm usually nervous in cars. Whether I'm driving or riding, I can't seem to forget that I'm in a little shell,hurtling along. I want a death that comes from the inside, something I won't have to watch as it's happening - a clot turned loose in my brain, a glossy organ seizing up and shuddering in secret. Car wrecks are shattered windshields and jutting bones, the listless highway patrol scooping bits of you and not-you off the asphalt, zipping the whole mess into a bag. But when Bo is driving - even though she's always looking at herself in the rearview or swerving around road trash in case it's a bag of kittens - my anxiety, usually a thrum as steady and constant as my heartbeat, is something I can smother, tamp down, and forget about for a while.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.

Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, bitter, and wise. Black Light contains the type of storytelling that resonates somewhere deep, in the well of memory that repudiates nostalgia.


MY THOUGHTS: There are a lot of everyday materials that fluoresce or glow when placed under a black light. A black light gives off highly energetic ultraviolet light. Just as these energetic stories fluoresce and glow as they are being read. And just as a black light shows up things not normally visible to the human eye, these are the things that are focused upon in this collection of short stories.

Don't expect anything cute or heartwarming. The author focuses on the seamier side of life, the bits that happen, but nobody talks about, the bits that are swept under the carpet and glossed over. It is our fears and disappointments that she focuses on, not our dreams, aspirations and achievements.

Some of the stories border on the bizarre, all are slightly strange, but very, very real. This was an interesting read, one that deserves not to be hurried. These stories bear a closer inspection and I will be giving them a second read.

My two favourites in this collection are Fiddlebacks, and Starlite.

#BlackLight #NetGalley

😉🤔😏🙄

THE AUTHOR: Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the short story collection Black Light, forthcoming from Vintage August 13, 2019, and the novel The Boiling River, forthcoming from Knopf in 2020ish. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, New South, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Joyland, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in Bookforum, Fanzine, Time Out New York, The Millions, and elsewhere. She lives with her partner and sons in Portland, OR, where she is completing a novel about Texas, motherhood, and LSD.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage, via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system, please refer to my profile page on Goodreads.com or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon and my webpage https://sandysbookaday.wordpress.com/...

Kimberly King Parsons takes the ordinary and shows everything, cuts, brusies and warts. The stores in Black Light are full of relationships, love, heartbreak, pain and sexuality all under the cloud of honesty and darkness.

It's uncomfortable in the way that makes you uncomfortable BECAUSE you like it. You like the glimpse into the dark, secret lives of others.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book. ⁣

I’ll start with the obvious: I *loved* this book. It does a service to the short story form. The characters in these stories are so weird and so full of flaws and so human; they are like thick oil paintings with too much color, saturated and alive. It’s really incredible to be able to pull this off, it’s like the trick of the short story that’s so hard to figure out, and Parsons does it beautifully. A lot of the characters and the plots are difficult, sometimes downright unlikeable, but the writing sings and dances and comes right out to smack you, which is kind of the best. Also, there’s way more queer content in here than I was expecting, with at least 3 stories centering WLW. The title story is my favorite, but I love them all. CW for eating disorders, drug use, and depression in this book, just a heads up. So worth reading; I have a book hangover from this one. Highly recommend!

I'm not always a fan of short story collections because I feel like I know what I'm getting. Some stories will be good, some stories will be bad, and I will have to grind my teeth through the ones I don't like hoping that the next will be better. By the fourth story in the debut collection by Kimberly King Parsons, I knew that this is different. This is the rare collection of short stories that are all incredible. There is no variation in quality. They are all incredible.

Most of these stories are about people who are flawed in ways that are not always seen by the naked eye. Even though the collection is titled after one of the stories, "Black Light" is a perfect metaphor for the way Kimberly King Parsons writes all of these characters. A black light brings out the glaring flaws, the dirt and stains that are under the surface and not always visible with the naked eye. The way that King Parsons writes these stories, as if she is not a writer but a spirit, a haunt that has possessed these characters long enough to A) know all of their secrets, insecurities, and motivations and B) make them do her bidding, really draws the reader into these lives, and quite honestly create worlds that are so detailed in such a short space that anyone trying to write great stories and novels should try to dissect these stories to figure out how it is done.

All of these stories are sad, sometimes tragic, sometimes upsetting, but there is not a single time when I did not feel a connection to what was happening and the outcome. I loved so many of the sentences, so many of the scenes, so many of the bad decisions and tension, and I honestly will be looking forward to reading all of Kimberly King Parson's works in the future.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

A dark and gritty short story collection for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh. Ultimately I found that the narratives didn’t live up to the writing though.

This author is clearly very talented, but I didn't see what point she wanted to make with these stories. I had real trouble feeling engaged with the characters, and many of the situations seemed either contrived or meant to shock the reader with lurid details of bodily fluids or drugs. This collection of stories needed a focus and purpose.

'I’ve almost had no loss in my life, but I still believe we’re always in between tragedies, that anything good is a lull before the next devastation.'

The stories in this collection are wickedly rich. In Foxes, a little girl’s plot-lines revolve around what’s deep in the woods. But the mother already knows what horror can live outside of fairy-tales, the tragedy of confusing a fool for a knight! She dearly hopes her daughter escaped her inheritance of bad choices, and if pretty isn’t enough than thank god for her brains! People living nowhere or searching for somewhere, even when they are living on fumes, pockets full of nothing! When you’re hungry, when your broke love is a war zone, but when will The Light Pour In? If love were a scale, what does age difference weigh? These aren’t your beautiful, blessed folks, no no no… these are ruined people.

In Fiddlebacks, children chase creepy crawlies while their mother finds comfort in the back of a car with a man whose face is ravaged. Drugs, cheating for the illicit pleasure, a charismatic friend who fires the blood of first love, snarled minds that art therapy attempts to mend, and a medical student that charts his beloveds insides, grounding her.

The writing is sometimes like sand in my eyes, it’s raw. The characters don’t stand sure and tall, they ‘cant’ help but see a thing through its disappointing end’, and are nothing like wise, unbelievable sketches of people in other novels who know how to navigate their perfect, clean little lives. Somehow, this is far easier to relate to! This is a curious collection and I can’t wait to read a full novel by Parsons! Feast yours eyes on that cover people, that is a hell of a book cover!!!

Publication Date: August 13, 2019

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

A little too dark and bleak for my taste right now. The plot were creative but too much of negativity just made it a difficult read for me.

A haunting, poetic collection reminiscent of Ottessa Moshfegh. The sharp, dark prose in these bold stories delights in it's otherworldly strangeness, skirting the fringes of society in pockets of shadow.

Unfortunately, no matter how much you love an author a short story collection will be uneven. As readers we all know the score. Black Light is the debut story collection by Kimberly King Parsons. When I started this collection, I was unfamiliar with the author. These stories explore the human condition in all of it’s ugliness. I would be lying if I said I loved every story but Ms Parsons voice and skill as a writer made each story a compulsive read. The soft no and we don’t come natural to it would definitely be my favorites. I’m thrilled to see where Kimberly Parsons fiction is heading. If you enjoy Ottessa Moshfegh definitely check this book out.

BLACK LIGHT is an intense read, but I thoroughly enjoyed this short story collection. Recommended for fans of literary fiction, BLACK LIGHT explores the theme of desire--and Parsons is not afraid to delve into some dark places. The result is honest and unflinching and most certainly entertaining. While some stories are stronger and more memorable than others, the author's talent is on full display here. Even at its most unsettling, this collection impresses.