Customer Reviews

Piranha to Scurfy: And Other Stories

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The stories are good, mysterious. Add to that the outstanding talents of Jenny Sterlin and you have 4 hours of good times ahead.

The stories range from being chilling and disturbing to being a bit on the dull side. It is still worth reading as some of the stories are very good but overall I think the collection is a bit uneven.

Ruth Rendell is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and I was not disappointed by this collection. The three I most enjoyed were the title story, The Professionals and High Mysterious Union. What sets Rendell apart from most suspense writers is the originality of her characters. She has a knack for creating highly ambiguous personalities with unexpected (and often amusing) eccentricities. Ambrose Ribbon, of Piranha To Scurfy, is such a character. An intellectual elitist and loner, he writes scathing letters to popular authors, pointing out trivial errors in their works. The way he gradually comes undone reminded me of Poe's The Telltale Heart.

The final story, High Mysterious Union, is set in a wonderfully
eerie atmosphere. Although we've all read stories or seen films about sinister rustic villages, no one can do this better than Rendell, and this story has an unusual twist (the villagers aren't devil worshippers looking for sacrificial victims, as I first suspected).

All in all, a brilliant collection of stories. If you're not already a Ruth Rendell fan, this will probably make you want to read some of her novels.

Never having read Rendell, who is widely thought of as being amongst the best contemporary crime writers, I figured this new collection might be the place to start. I was rather disappointed to find that the six short stories and two much longer novellas are character studies that are more intent on evoking mood than delivering an interesting plot or story. The short stories are particularly weak, with the possible exception of "The Professional," This latter story tells of a shoeshine boy who witnesses a murder and stays quiet, rather than rock the boat and risk his job. It's a little more interesting than the others if only for the class issues it touches upon. "The Wink" and "Walter's Leg" both revisit ancient crimes and bestow predictable, if long overdue, justice. "Catamount" is a simple story of a woman and mountain lion, entirely unremarkable and reading like a writing exercise. "The Beach Butler" is a perfectly awful story about a single woman without much money on vacation, and the dusky local she falls for. "The Astronomical Scarf" follows a scarf through the hands of various owners over the years (much like E. Annie Proulx's novel Accordion Crimes), and paints quick sketches of each. Rendell's icily detached narrative voice runs throughout the stories, making them even less interesting.

The title story is a long and predictable authorial revenge-fantasy that veers off into supernatural horror. Mostly consisting of an extended character study, it follows a cliché of a maternally dominated middle-aged pedant whose madness consumes him. Living alone since his mother's death (he killed her, duh!), he spends his days reading books and writing letters to their authors and publishers pointing out mistakes. His comeuppance-as if there was any doubt there would be any-arrives in the form of a new bestseller by a Stephen King type. It's a tired story, and takes far too long to tell. The same could be said of the even longer final story, "High Mysterious Union." In it, a lovely small English village isn't all it seems to be, as two outsiders recount their experiences there to each other. It's as if Rendell had read Magnus Mills's droll Kafkaesque novel All Quiet on the Orient Express and decided to do something similar, with a Stepford Wives twist. In any event, it's neither original nor compelling, and the collection won't inspire me to read any more Rendell.

Ouch! This is a major disappointment compared to her earlier collection, "The Fallen Curtain". Want mystery and suspense, or even a little slightly interesting reading? Try a title other than this one. The title story is plodding (versus the "plotting" I was hoping for) with no surprises to make the ending worth waiting for. Another story, "High Mysterious Union", is similarly longer than the actual story warrants. No twists, no surprises. Methinks she might have been focusing on character development at the expense of a good read.

I went to the library for a couple of books on a rainy morning. "Piranha to Scurfy" was just what I needed! Liked the first story best. You just knew he would come to a bad end with his obsession for perfection. I couldn't feel sorry for him. He drove himself over the edge.

Another reviewer mentioned she wondered if the author was getting back at readers who send her criticisms? That could be.

I like this author's way of ending her stories. Usually they are a surprise and I like that. I gave this only four stars as I am having trouble with the last story.

It's been a long time since Ruth Rendell published a book of short stories, but _Piranha to Scurfy_ is worth the wait. There is plenty to like here; although the nine stories (including the novellas "High Mysterious Union," and "Piranha to Scurfy") have their high and low points, overall they make an interesting and entertaining addition to Rendell's work.

I should say at the beginning that I do not believe, as some seem to do, that Ruth Rendell's work is in any way in decline. Though _The Chimney Sweeper's Boy_ and _Harm Done_ will never rank among my favorite Rendell novels, I don't believe that they are on any different literary level from her books of five or ten years ago, and I freely admit to preferring her most recent work to earlier books like _One Across, Two Down_. I think Rendell's prolificacy leaves her books susceptible to uneven quality. Additionally, her affinity for writing and plotting in several different styles means that many readers will not like all of her books.

The title story, called "Piranha to Scurfy" in the Rendellian tradition of the initially incomprehensible title, is a claustrophobic story of paranoia and obsessive compulsion that reminded me initially of earlier Rendell books like _The Bridesmaid_ and _Talking to Strange Men_ but an important difference soon became apparent; there is a surprisingly funny side to "Piranha to Scurfy." The protagonist is so unattractive, so irritating, that it is nearly impossible for the reader to feel empathy for him. "Piranha to Scurfy" does not force the reader to align herself with the protagonist/murderer in this story as she has in some of her other work; the dramatic depth of this story is therefore less than in a book like _Live Flesh_ but judged on its own merits and as a story which is intended to be humorous, "Piranha to Scurfy" succeeds.

Of the shorter stories, "Catamount" was an enjoyable story that illustrated something that every horror movie viewer knows to be true: just because you know what's going to happen doesn't mean it won't scare the bejesus out of you when it does. "Walter's Leg" was funny, and almost something of a tease on Rendell's part; sometimes, she seems to say, nothing really terrible happens. "Fair Exchange" reminded me of some of the occult-inspired short stories of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie. "The Professionals" was an interesting portrait of not-quite-cheeky-enough bootblack and a brief case study of class in that bizarre microcosm, the department store.

Some of the stories were less satisfying; "The Wink" was a story about revenge, but not a particularly spectacular or satisfying revenge. "The Astronomical Scarf," reminded me of a 7th grade essay written from the point of view of Ben Franklin's pocket watch and seemed to get bogged down occasionally. "The Beach Butler" was well written, the characters quickly and skillfully drawn but seemed to lack resolution.

"High Mysterious Union," the eighty-page novella that finishes the book was a departure from the rest of Piranha to Scurfy, and not just because of its greater length. It doesn't share the humor present in the other stories and the writing is more studied than that in the rest of the book. The narrator and her friend are strangers in a small village, but the villagers are very much outsiders to normal society. The unusual behavior of the villagers and the choices forced upon the outsiders are thought provoking and reminded me of a fleshed-out scenario from a "Book of Questions." What would you do? Why? The story seems to want to know.

Taken as a whole, Piranha to Scurfy is even more engaging than its component stories. Rendell demonstrates her facility for writing from several different viewpoints and in several different styles. Additionally, Piranha to Scurfy shows a sense of humor often absent from Rendell's non-Wexford stories, and the excellent craftsmanship we have come to expect from Rendell's work. Though even longtime Rendell fans may not like every story in the book, this volume contains a selection from which almost anyone should be able to find something they like.

Certainly better than her last two The Chimney Sweepers Boy and The Grasshopper, two very disappointing books from the grand master of suspense. I agree with the previous reviewer who said Rendell has not been as good as her early/middle masterpieces, please read those!! This one had a good novella, High Mysterious Union, that truly a page turner, and Catamount was excellent in its eeriness of atmosphere, and a punchy ending, but The Wink was horrible, (and very unsatisfying in the revenge department, to say the least) as was Walters Leg, ditto. the first story was good in some places, but I agree with the previous reviewer again, I thought it would move beyond the tyranical mother/abused son motif to show a writer taking revenge on a reader with either or both being a little off the wall, as in all the best Rendell stories, and with a lot more plot twists involved. I felt this story kind of limped along for many more pages than it needed to. But all things considered it's not a bad volume of her stories and The Professional is very good, as is The Exchange. So its a mixed bag, but worth reading certainly.

Though I remain one of her legion of fans, with each successive published work, I find myself asking "Why"? "Pirahna to Scurfy" has to be the worst offering of short stories that Rendell has written to date. The plots are thin, the endings seem forced. The title piqued my curiosity when I first saw the title on sale in my nearest bookseller. However, an obscure title cannot begin to compensate for tired colorless writing. In truth, Rendell hasn't written a truly gripping novel or short story collection since her works of the early to late 80's. I am only thankful I didn't waste a dime on purchasing this tame literary gesture but read it, borrowed from my neighborhood library.

Ruth Rendell is one of my favorite mystery writers, so my disappointment in this collection of stories was all the keener. In the title story,the cliched tyrannical mother-dominated, creepy son relationship certainly robbed the ending of any surprise. The only aspect that caught my attention was whether Rendell's depiction of a stupidly pedantic "critic" was the author's revenge on nit-picking readers. As for "High Mysterious Union"--in the "it's an idyllic English village with salt-of-the- earth country folk . . . or IS it?" genre, Fay Weldon wrote a much better, much creepier, and much funnier novel: Puffball (a book I would not recommend to a pregnant reader!). For a superior collection of Rendell stories, seek out The Fever Tree and Other Stories.