The Ice Child: And Other Stories

by Leon Arden

Overview

Addressing a consistent set of themes—most revolving around characters who are in conflict with one another based on differences in culture, age, or personality—The Ice Child offers eleven moving short stories by author Leon Arden.

The collection introduces a wide cast of characters and scenarios. A husband and wife, touring Mexico, are confronted while on horseback, by savage bandits; a young man tries to rescue his mother from his father’s obsession, which is filling their apartment with more books than it can hold; a comic drama between two lovers is waged solely through messages left on their answering machines; a son wheels his sick father into a hospital and demands, at gun point, that he be given a heart by-pass; a lovely English woman arrives in New York to find she must share an apartment with a man she has never met; and a failed writer, with two friends, programs a computer to create a salable story, but ominously the PC also predicts their immediate future.

Bookended by stories about youth and old age, The Ice Child presents a unique but highly entertaining collection of tales.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491772812
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/09/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	187 KB

About the Author

Leon Arden was born in New York and attended Columbia University before becoming a free-lance photographer in the US and Europe. He published five novels and many short stories. Arden’s play, “The Midnight’s Ride of Alvin Blum” (written with Donald Honig) had several productions in America. He is married and lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

2015-11-05
An impressive array of short stories from prolific novelist and playwright Arden (The Walk to the Paradise Garden, 2011). Within these 11 well-written, pleasing tales of varying lengths and moods, Arden conjures a kaleidoscopic array of emotions, characters, and predicaments, with humanity as a common thread. Though the circumstances presented can be found in everyday lives and commonplace relationships, Arden still manages to bring each story to life with creative vibrancy and colorful prose. The slyly effective opening story, "Coming of Age," features a worrisome London-based husband and wife traversing tricky terrain while on a ranchland vacation in Mexico. Cruel high school students and lifelong movie buffs also figure into other slick entries about life's twists and turns. Arden's skills are even more on display in the shorter stories, which feature a potent economy of words, as in the six-page story "Come Live with Me and Be My Love," in which a lovely woman and her timid, doting co-worker/roommate with a "face like a first draft" fall in and out of love (and back again) after a calamitous relationship misstep. Also splendidly rendered is a story of an unrequited affair that plays out in a series of volleying voice mails escalating in urgency between an obsessive, embittered woman and a disinterested man in "A Feminine Ending." From the towel-stealing, cross-country traveling newlyweds in "Craters of the Moon Motel" to the hoarder mentality of the aging father in "The Book Collector," Arden stunningly chronicles average lives in varying states of flux. The futuristic titular tale brims with introspection and hindsight as two outsiders ruminate over the demise of planet Earth through the historic recordings of an incurable psychopath frozen for posterity. The collection curiously ends with melancholy tones as the wise, elderly man and Great Depression survivor in "Make My Bed and Light the Light" turns 90. Savory, memorable morsels of brilliance from a clever wordsmith and a considerable talent to watch.

Kirkus Reviews