We're All in This Together

by Owen King

Book Overview

Imaginative, gripping stories and a funny, poignant novella set in Maine after the 2000 presidential election make up this exciting literary debut. Owen King is a writer interested in the choices we... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571227244
• ISBN13: 9780571227242
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Length: 135 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

The Torch Has Been Thrown

Owen King the son of mega-selling phenomenon Stephen King shines with this collection. His first foray into the publishing world. The writing is like a refreshened Stephen King, like the second coming. At times macabre but mostly very poignant. The novella, "We're All In This Together," is a mostly bittersweet story. There is comedy mixed in. Mr. King captures the climate of the nation at the time period it takes place. Everyone thinks they are right. But we're all in it together and we all deal with the same problems, young or old. "Frozen Animals" is a short strange, narrative about a dentist. I believe the title implies the chracters in this story are animals. Read the story and I think you will believe the same. "Wonders" is a snapshot, a picture post-card of an era long gone. The thoughts and views of the characters are where the nation was at that time. Baseball seems to be a running theme with both King writers. This story is a macabre and sad semi-love story. "Snake," a story of a young man obsessed with crime novels is kind of strange. He comes from a broken home and believes his father lies about everything. It is poignant and sort of ends abruptly. The final story "My Second Wife" is like a bad acid trip. Very weird story of a road trip to aquire a death row inmates car. Strange, strange, strange. All and all each narrative is crafted with surgical precision. A worthy beginning to what I hope will be a thriving career.

An amazing book

The overarching theme of "We're All In This Together," the main novella in Owen King's debut collection, is that people are insane. Left, right, conservative, liberal - they're all nuts. They also all (well, almost all) believe that they're doing the right thing, but as King so astutely points out, well-intentioned crazy is still crazy. The novella is not just a gripping, touching and hilarious story; it's an important one, particularly in today's perspective-free political climate. This book also takes a vast view of literary possibility. Every story is different, but King always demonstrates a keen eye for details both absurd and heart-rending while never managing to lose sight of his stories' vital emotional core. Even "My Second Wife" - a bit of sublime absurdity that starts with a parade and ends with an anorexic emu - touches on a serious place, a place full of love and loss and the power of human connection. These stories (like "Wonders," a Tim Powers-esque freakshow with a horribly beautiful edge, and "Frozen Animals," which seems to have been written in Jack London's darkest place) are full of sharp, tight images and observations that stay with you long after the covers are closed. Owen King is that rarest of all writers: a gifted storyteller with a true insight into human nature.

Praise for Owen King

Owen King should be commended for his fabulous novella and short story collection, "We're All in This Together". Not only because the result is a hilarious and touching tour de force which honestly made me both laugh and cry, but because he tackles many of the same thematic and stylistic questions as a number of his more established contemporaries and, I think, emerges victorious. Like Russell Banks in "Rule of the Bone", King takes on a Northeastern teenager with a broken family and a penchant for trashy malls in "Snake", but he offers us a more real and tender protagonist whose strip mall adventures - including an aging has-been and his less than terrifying boa constrictor, Julius Squeezer (one of the funniest names I've ever encountered) - elicit much more empathy in the reader than Banks' Bone. Fortunately, "Snake" is just one of four magnetic short stories. King's stories draw you in with their mixture of the grotesque, the hysterical and the fantastic - imaginatively constructed twists and turns in the trajectory of his unconventional plots. His prose is quirky just like John Irving's, but, I'm convinced, more charming. And, as much as I loved his short stories, the novella was the best part of the collection.

Refreshingly Willing to Tell a Good Story

Owen King's first book arrives just in time, a welcome corrective to all that needs improvement in contemporary fiction: it is heartfelt, genuine, and very, very funny. Gone are the tricky postmodern devices of the McSweeney's set, the pseudo-intellectuals riding up escalators to buy shoelaces. What we get, instead, are nineteenth-century animal trappers, pot-smoking retirees, paintball fighting, and a riot of Coney Island circus performers - all rendered with a combination of generous imagination and firm prose that made me think of Richard Russo, Dickens, or the early John Irving. The title novella is a sympathetic commentary on the perils of dogmatism. It sketches a world in which neither of the ideological poles its plot so carefully sets up -- the liberal-activist grandfather or the hapless, republican "Dr. Vic"-- can be either fully supported or completely criticized. The child at the center of this tug-of-war is the story's emotional grounding: he learns, at the same pace readers do, to extend his sympathies, to look further than his assumptions -- and to recognize that we ourselves are often the ones most in need of, well, re-centering. Despite their laugh-out-loud jokes and uniquely outsized plotting, it's possible, too, to identify thematic links among King's stories. In their ways, all of these stories demonstrate the untidiness of lived experience, charting how physical bodies, irrational emotions, and the world itself infringe on the desire for pure truths, for certainty. As is evident in "We're All In This Together" and "Wonders" especially, the solid assurance that an election or a baseball swing might offer is something that's never granted these characters. And as "My Second Wife" shows maybe most of all, King's entertaining, endlessly promising first book gives evidence of a sensibility --the characters', the author's, or both-- that can't help but create stories as a way of coping with the world's hard contradictions. The storytellers King sketches here use humor and imagination as their preferred devices of survival: fiction itself brings coherence to lives that are unchangeably, even admirably messy. This is an entertaining and affecting collection by a new writer with a gift for telling tales.

an exceptional collection from a formidable new talent

Owen King's debut collection, We're All in This Together, reveals an expert craftsman at work, a brilliant storyteller whose creations never strike a false note and never fail to surprise. The eponymous novella, set in the wake of the fateful 2000 presidential election, is told in the pitch-perfect voice of an adolescent coming uneasily of age in Maine. Carefully balancing pathos and humor, King tells of the dissolution and attempted restoration of the young narrator's family on the one hand and the attenuated but ultimately salvageable ideals of the community and its most high-minded exponents on the other. In the four short stories that follow, which take in everything from a baseball team representing Coney Island in fullest, oddest flower to an itinerant dentist whose snowbound trek to treat a patient requires as much mettle as the ghastly extraction he must perform, King's creative vision and his perfect empathy for the characters whose fallibilities and grace render their stories worth the telling are on full display. We're All in This Together is a remarkable collection which rewards with every turn of the page and resounds with an emotional authenticity able to make the most callous heart or the most deadened tooth ache.