In the Valley of the Kings

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In the Valley of the Kings Pub. Date: 9/14/2009 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

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Overview

In the Valley of the Kings marks the extraordinary debut of Terrence Holt, who fifteen years ago abandoned a promising writing career to practice medicine. Moved by his patients’ valor in the face of death, seeking to comprehend the mysteries revealed at their bedside, Holt has taken up fiction again. He emerges now with this astonishing collection of one novella and seven short stories that explore the farthest reaches of the imagination in a style that recalls the nineteenth-century American masters.

Holt leaps across genres and millennia, from small-town America to deep space, daring his readers to journey with him into realms as mysterious as they are unforgettable. The opening story, “‘Ο Λογοσ,” is a chilling account of the last days of the human race, as the hospitalization of a little girl in a New England town heralds a terrifying plague, transmitted not by a microbe but by a single word. The final story, “Apocalypse,” returns to small-town New England and another vision of the end, in an intimate account of how a couple struggles to live and love under the shadow of the Earth’s approaching doom.
In between, these stories range from outer space, where—in “Charybdis”—an astronaut alone on a doomed NASA mission comes to terms with his fate, to the Egyptian desert of the title novella, where an archaeologist seeks a fabulous tomb that holds the secret of immortality. Painting with lurid colors and finely crafted prose, Holt offers his readers haunting visions of the reefs and abysses of the human imagination. In the Valley of the Kings redefines the art of the story, throwing aside the rules in search of the enduring truths that ultimately make stories worth reading.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In this haunting collection, Holt's lush language pulls literary treasures out of dark places, bringing readers ice from the rings of Saturn “where seeing and vanishing are one,” a cartouche from deep within an ancient tomb and the late-night conversations of a married couple awaiting the end of the world. Magical realism tinges the grim “My Father's Heart,” about a man who keeps his father's heart in a jar on his mantelpiece, and “Scylla,” in which a captain returns from sea to find his home altered by an inexplicable force. An ominous future is the backdrop of “Eurydike,” in which an amnesiac wakes up in a place full of empty beds and incomprehensible clocks. “Aurora” follows the heartbreaking thoughts of a spaceship doomed to harvest ice. A tantalizing puzzle takes root in one story (its title is Greek) as a lonely survivor investigates the cause of a disease that marks its victims with a single word repeated over and over beneath the skin. This collection, with its allusions to mythology and tragic conundrums, demands intelligence and rewards the reader with Borgesian riches. (Sept.)

Library Journal

In his debut collection, practicing physician Holt takes on the big cosmological questions in stunning fashion, recalling writers like Conrad, Hawthorne, and Melville in the scope of his interests and the grandeur of his style. His characters, like the astronaut in "Charybdis" (an O. Henry award winner from 1982, first published in the Kenyon Review) and the archaeologist in the title novella, stand on the precipice of the unknown, whether the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, or the contents of an Egyptian tomb. Not surprisingly, "Charybdis" has its counterpart in a story called "Scylla," in which a ship's captain and crew are faced with an amorphous danger called "the Law" that keeps them from venturing out again once they've come back to port. Here, Odysseus meets Bartleby the Scrivener, and domesticity brings its own rewards. VERDICT This collection represents a life's work of stories that are not well known outside of the readership of literary journals. That's about to change, and it's a good thing.—Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

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Kirkus Reviews

Arthur C. Clarke meets Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka in these dark, dense stories. Holt is a crafter of words as well as a believer in the magical potency of The Word, for many of his stories have as their theme the power of a single word. In "? ????s," for example, a five-year-old girl is brought to an emergency room with bruises on her hands, cheeks, forehead and arms, bruises that form a mysterious word she utters just before she dies. The physical transference of this word (also in bruises) to others forms first an epidemic and then a plague. In "My Father's Heart," the nameless narrator literally keeps his father's heart in a glass jar, but by allegorical extension this artifact becomes an image of his love, guilt and pain. The chilling "Charybdis" introduces us to a mission to Jupiter gone awry. Two of the three astronauts on board go insane and leave the ship, with predictably fatal results, while the third, the narrator, has harrowing conversations with mission control that make it clear he is also struggling with issues of psychological autonomy. The title piece is more of a novella than a short story. Here a scholar of Egyptian antiquities has participated in uncovering the tomb of Nur-Mar, but he has also contracted a fatal disease borne by an unknown pathogen. His quest is to discover the meaning of a cryptic papyrus he has stolen from the tomb, a papyrus that he hopes will lead him to a mysterious "‘word of hidden meaning.'" The "dangerous madness" he attributes to the silence of Nur-Mar's dynasty mirrors his own obsession and paranoia. Stories for those who wish to enter enigmatic and uncomfortable spaces.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393071214
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 9/14/2009
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 5.80 (w) x 8.56 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Terrence Holt taught literature and writing at Rutgers University and Swarthmore College for a decade before attending medical school. Many of these stories have appeared in different forms in literary journals and prize anthologies, including the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Zoetrope, Bookforum, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. A contributing editor for Men’s Health, Holt teaches and practices medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

'O [Lamba]o[gamma]o[zeta] 11

My Father's Heart 27

Charybdis 33

Aurora 59

In the Valley of the Kings 115

Scylla 193

Apocalypse 203

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