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Voodoo Heart
by
Scott Snyder (Goodreads Author)
Scott Snyder’s protagonists inhabit a playfully deranged fictional world in which a Wall Street trader can find himself armed with a speargun, guarding a Dumpster outside a pawnshop in Florida; or an employee at Niagara Falls (his job: watching for jumpers) will take off in a car after a blimp in which his girlfriend has escaped. But in Snyder’s wondrous imagination there’...more
Paperback, 288 pages
Published
May 29th 2007
by Dial Press Trade Paperback
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Community Reviews
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Nov 25, 2007
Rachel Cassandra
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
the quirks
Shelves:
shortstories
the pages of this particular book (i'm not sure if it's true of all the copies) were especially smooth and soft, as if the paper had been polished.
the stories were engaging, quirky, and i loved them. My favorite was "Happy fish, plus coin", but almost all the stories have moments and aspects I will remember for a long time. I was also intrigued in the fact that the stories sometimes had small connections between them- mentions of the same song or similar situations. The imagery was offbeat and...more
the stories were engaging, quirky, and i loved them. My favorite was "Happy fish, plus coin", but almost all the stories have moments and aspects I will remember for a long time. I was also intrigued in the fact that the stories sometimes had small connections between them- mentions of the same song or similar situations. The imagery was offbeat and...more
One of most frustrating things about studying literature in college is that it robs a lot of the magic from fiction. You get a sense of how everything fits together, you understand how certain ideas and techniques combine to achieve a certain effect, and it starts to feel more like engineering than art. So the highest complement I can pay Scott Snyder is that the stories in Voodoo Heart all left me pleasantly baffled. There's always something that doesn't quite fit, some effect you couldn't anti...more
To be honest, "Voodoo Heart" was my least favorite story in Scott Snyder's collection, Voodoo Heart.
Voodoo Heart is a very well organized collection of stories from the writer of one of my recent favorite comic books, American Vampire. The title story marks (though in my opinion, not well) the climax of a series of stories exploring the notions of "attachment" to places, people, and things in 1930s America. Not to belabor the point, while "Voodoo Heart" might have been a good story presented in...more
Voodoo Heart is a very well organized collection of stories from the writer of one of my recent favorite comic books, American Vampire. The title story marks (though in my opinion, not well) the climax of a series of stories exploring the notions of "attachment" to places, people, and things in 1930s America. Not to belabor the point, while "Voodoo Heart" might have been a good story presented in...more
In his first (and so far only) literary outing, Scott Snyder takes us on a journey to the darkest and dustiest corners of America, with this handful of quirky stories that follow a group of men through their somewhat odd and dream-like lives.
I heard alot of praise going into this, but felt somewhat let down. The stories were entertaining and kept me enthralled, but I was kind left feeling empty by the open endings to every story. I get what he was trying to do, but they just didn't quite pack a...more
I heard alot of praise going into this, but felt somewhat let down. The stories were entertaining and kept me enthralled, but I was kind left feeling empty by the open endings to every story. I get what he was trying to do, but they just didn't quite pack a...more
I picked up Voodoo Heart because I admire Snyder’s work on American Vampire. I was interested to see Snyder’s prose stand alone without a team of artists’ aid. For the most part, I found myself quite pleased.
Each and every one of Snyder’s stories in this collection is original and very well written. They all utilize well-rounded characters that instantly attach to the psyche and schema. My only complaint, however, is that nearly half of them ended with no real sense of resolution. I don’t necess...more
Each and every one of Snyder’s stories in this collection is original and very well written. They all utilize well-rounded characters that instantly attach to the psyche and schema. My only complaint, however, is that nearly half of them ended with no real sense of resolution. I don’t necess...more
Please don't read this if you have a relationship with a significant other that is the slightest bit in question. My marriage is on pretty stable ground right now & this still depressed the heck out of me. While all the stories are lovely & extrememly well-written, they're also all about relationships going horribly wrong & people being sad or making others sad. I didn't find a lot of the fancy here that most reviews allude to, but that doesn't make this a bad book, just a bummer. Ha...more
5 likes · like · see review
Recently, I've become more familiar with Scott Snyder's work in comics, particulary in the case of his current run on Batman and American Vampire. Voodoo Heart, his collection of short stories, is my first introduction to his work outside of comics, and it does not disappoint whatsoever. All of the stories within this collection focus on a bunch of quirky, heartwarming, and heartbreaking studies of characters who experience turning points in their lives. My personal favorite is the last one in t...more
This piece of collected short stories was pretty entertaining. The writing was definitely of good quality. Each character was different from one another, which takes a talent of writing in order to pull off. Each story obviously had disheartening, relatively sad endings, a fact of reality. However, I would have enjoyed a couple stories to be done in a female's perspective. I also would have liked for the stories to have contained relatively different endings. Still relative to people, yet not fo...more
It's been some time since I've read a book of short stories, and Voodoo Heart reminded me of how refreshing and inspiring they can be. Snyder's Voodoo Heart is held together by a faint steampunk theme and a series of male narrators who are dealing with the emotions of love. Snyder's prose is straightforward, but he employs some surprising metaphors and analogies to describe the narrator's feelings. The collection made me realize that it is rare for me to read (or choose) a book from the male per...more
Feb 19, 2012
Kurt Dinan
added it
Am reading this book of short stories now after reading a review of it by Stephen King.
1 like · like · see review
I loved this book. I have always been a fan of short stories but finding a good collection of short stories is so often hard. It's hard to put your finger on what but so many leave me wanting. This book did anything but. I eagerly await Scott Snyder's next work, having originally known him from comics I decided to give this a try and it is just outstanding. A collection of stories, all of them romances to a degree, all of them about one on one relationships. There is a general dissatisfaction at...more
This is one of the best collections of short stories I have read in a long time. Scott Snyder takes seemingly ordinary characters, gives them unique and slightly offbeat voices and then lets their actions transform them. Heartbreaking moments are interspersed with moments of profound transformation to give the collection a completeness that is often missing from short story collections.
I love it when a novel or a story takes me so far outside of myself that I have trouble figuring out where I a...more
I love it when a novel or a story takes me so far outside of myself that I have trouble figuring out where I a...more
I think I like Scott Snyder more as a comic book writer than a prose writer haha. This book is very good (hence the 4 stars) and he does some beautiful writing but I find him to be more original in his comic work. I did like how all of the stories were just subtly off. There was no real fantasy or horror story. And they weren't quite as surreal as Benjamin Rosenbaum, Kelly Link, Jeffrey Ford etc. But almost all of them just had some slight strangeness to them. The characters were just slightly s...more
I've read Scott Snyder's Batman, Swamp Thing, and American Vampire, and deeply enjoyed and admired his writing in all; I've wanted to read VH but it was the Fatman on Batman podcast that really inspired me to read VH.
Short stories aren't typically my cup of tea, but the strong writing, emotions, and characters just poured from the page. I think my favorites were About Face, Voodoo Heart, and the Star Attraction of 1919, though all are good. Highly recommended for the pursuer of Literature or the...more
Short stories aren't typically my cup of tea, but the strong writing, emotions, and characters just poured from the page. I think my favorites were About Face, Voodoo Heart, and the Star Attraction of 1919, though all are good. Highly recommended for the pursuer of Literature or the...more
So I've made it to the end of Scott Snyder's short story collection and for the most part I really enjoyed it. My favorite stories were "Happy Fish, Plus Coin", "Wreck", and "The Star Attraction of 1919". "Blue Yodel" and "Voodoo Heart" were in the middle. "About Face" and "Dumpster Tuesday" were my least favorite and that is mostly due to the sheer frustration the main character of each story caused me.
After reading each story, I could get a sense for the writing pattern Scott Snyder was in dur...more
After reading each story, I could get a sense for the writing pattern Scott Snyder was in dur...more
Voodoo Heart was both instructive and entertaining. Scientifically speaking, I learned about the maladapted Paranthropus, the anatomy of synthetic plants, and various other nuggets of information. The strongest stories of the collection where the last four: Voodoo Heart, Wreck, Dumpster Tuesday and The Star Attraction 1919. The characters in these four stories were compelling, and so authentic I nearly believed they existed outside of Snyder's imagination. As a writer, I often can spot contrived...more
Feb 08, 2013
Victor Giannini
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Batman Fans
Recommended to Victor by:
Scott Snyder
Before Scott Snyder exploded onto the comic scene, Voodoo Heart gripped me with it's surreal stories. Most fell into the realm of magical realism, even if only in feeling, yet all felt like heart break, leaving the reader grasping for a lost love of some sort, a person, an ideal, a place, as their heals give way in the dirt and they spiral down. It's also quite funny, I swear!
If you're a fan of his comic writing, pick this book up right now.
If you're a fan of his comic writing, pick this book up right now.
I bought this collection based on a commenter's tip posted on HTML Giant. The person had claimed that "Voodoo Heart", the title story in Scott Snyder's debut story collection, was the best story he/she had ever read.
I loved "Voodoo Heart" (I skipped to it first), but I found all the stories equally as heartbreaking, emotionally real, and challenging. Though realistic, these stories have enough fantastical, strange, and unlikely elements to make them seem suspended, like fog rising from a lake a...more
I loved "Voodoo Heart" (I skipped to it first), but I found all the stories equally as heartbreaking, emotionally real, and challenging. Though realistic, these stories have enough fantastical, strange, and unlikely elements to make them seem suspended, like fog rising from a lake a...more
The NYT review of Voodoo Heart rightly questioned whether--despite the fact that a lot of these stories are "well-made and inventive" and have an "admirable" boldness--the book is really alive. Snyder's overeagerness to impress (and he does impress in pieces like "Blue Yodel" and "The Star Attraction of 1919") is balanced by some of his elegant writing, though the book has one too many moments that are too tender and too sweet to be taken at face value.
My dad lent this to me and I picked it up recently when I was unwell and needed a read that wouldn’t challenge my brain too much. This didn’t, but it did challenge my little heart just a bit, just enough for a book you can bliss out to and not have to think too much. This collection of short stories is about solitary humans grappling with relationships, people leaving or people being left.
I loved this! It had been awhile since I'd read some short stories, and this was perfect for my end-of-the-semester attention span. :P And I'm super excited that Scott Snyder apparently teaches at Columbia! I'm definitely hoping to take his class sometime. My favorites were "Happy Fish Plus Coin" and the title story, "Voodoo Heart."
The stories did get progressively better but I thought the writing wasn't amazing enough to make up for the open-endedness. It just didn't have anywhere near the same impact as Bradbury's. I guess that's what happens when you read the master before the student.
I'm not usually a fan of short stories. I guess normally they just leave me wanting more. This collection made me realize that's okay. After each story I wanted something more for the main characters. I couldn't believe how attached I got to them in such a brief period of time.
Great collection of short stories that leaves a feeling somewhere between 1910, a sea breeze, and a voyeur in you - at least from the parts I recall, having read the book over a year ago. Well written.
This is a great book of short stories that work themselves entirely away from the "workshop story" of the last decade or so. Snyder's stuff is packed with imagination, wonderful paragraphs, and stunning sentences.
No time to review at the moment, but Scott Snyder is a very good writer and I'm glad I discovered this collection (via his comics work, as I'm sure many others have done).
Suzy's brother. You have to like the kind of short stories which don't have conclusive endings. He gets you into the characters very quickly, by page 2. I loved it.
A very well written collection of 7 short stories, Snyder paints a whimsical, dark, absurd, and occasionally sad picture of men moving through their lives, generally nursing unhealthy obsessions. The prose is crisp and involving, the reveals perfectly paced. Snyder draws you in like a master - it's staggering to find out its a debut (though his quality has been shown with his American Vampire, Swamp Thing, and Batman comics work since). The only letdown to me were the endings of his stories, whi...more
Every little chapter has a hanging ending and it made it frustrating because I loved every story and I wanted to know how they ended
A fun collection of short stories by up and coming writer Scott Snyder. I dig his comics (especially his work on Batman and Swamp Thing) so I thought I'd check out his short story collection. The results are mixed. I really enjoyed many of the stories here -- there's a darkness to his stories that is very compelling, and I love his asides with interesting/weird facts about animals, history and other subjects. But I would have cut the second and third stories here, which lack the hooks of the oth...more
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Scott Snyder is the Eisner and Harvey Award winning writer on DC Comics Batman, Swamp Thing, and his original series for Vertigo, American Vampire. He is also the author of the short story collection, Voodoo Heart, published by the Dial Press in 2006. The paperback version was published in the summer of 2007.
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Nov 27, 2007 03:33pm