About the book:

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’s a thin membrane between the whimsical and the disturbing: the unlikely affair between a famous actress—in hiding after surgery—and a sporting goods salesman takes an ominous turn just as she begins to heal; an engaged couple’s relationship is fractured when one of them becomes obsessed with an inmate at the women’s prison next door.

Dark, funny, powerful, this highly acclaimed debut collection underscores the remarkable gifts of a fiercely original young writer.

A couple more reviews:

From The New York Times Book Review:
Reviewed by Andrew Sean Greer

"Snyder's true talent...transports us to the beautiful, quiet, darkened room of the best fiction...Pure ecstasy."



From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Snyder's delightfully deranged world contains characters living a circuslike existence. Crammed with acrobatic imaginings, the stories in this collection blur the line between the absurd and the profane. In one tale, a young man mistakenly crashes his two-seater plane into a farmhouse wedding and takes off with the bride; in another a loner captures the affection of a famous star whose face is a mass of bruises and cuts. "Blue Yodel" follows a bereft Niagara Falls "jumper" watch guard in hot pursuit of his fiancee, who has taken off in a blimp across the vast middle states. In "Happy Fish plus Coin," a trust-fund runaway meets an inspirational speaker who, like a cat with nine lives, keeps surviving horrendous accidents. Blimps, walkie-talkies, and metal detectors take on whimsical yet potent meaning. The dialogue is snappy, the characters sharp, and the story lines consuming, offering, at every turn, a new twist from the predictable, not unlike that of The Confessions of Max Tivoli (2004). Snyder is masterful, and the fact that he draws on uniquely American symbols, stories, and songs makes Voodoo Heart outstanding and unusual, and a spectacular debut.




From Kirkus Reviews:
* (Chosen by Kirkus as one of the "35 Hot Debuts of 2006")

Seven solidly constructed stories celebrate characters who are lost and don't necessarily wish to be found. Notable here is newcomer Snyder's thoughtful development of characters and themes. Blue Yodel, set in 1918, describes the increasing desperation of a lovelorn young man in pursuit of a zeppelin bearing away the woman he loves. Pres works as a barrel-watcher at Niagara Falls, and his failure to understand the lure of the falls points to some larger flaw in his nature; while Claire, a mime in a Buffalo wax museum, proves herself brightly capable of spontaneity and escapes him. Similarly, in The Star Attraction of 1919, a barnstormer down on his luck accidentally lands in the middle of an outdoor wedding party in Kansas and, in a curious turn of events, takes off with the bride. Although they become a star aviation attraction and even fall in love, what attracts Helen is not John per se but the thrill of danger and flight. Other stories delineate with chilling precision and depth the haplessness of emotionally diffident characters. About Face tracks a young man derailed from a childhood accident, unable to re-route himself to a successful life. The title story finds a young couple ensconced in a beautiful Florida house that happens to enjoin a women's prison; as the young man's interest in spying on the inmates increases, so does his fear of making a commitment to his girlfriend. Happy Fish, Plus Coin (the name of the Chinese restaurant in Orlando where the protagonists meet) painstakingly develops an unlikely friendship between a young man trying to flee the tentacles of his rich family and a wheelchair-bound confidence man who has escaped death three times - a truly bizarre tale. A pleasure to read, particularly for Snyder's careful attention to his craft.




From TimeOut NY:

An obsessed young romantic in a Model T pursues a blimp that carries his beloved. A fugitive from a wealthy Florida family meets a wheelchair-bound “indestructible” man in a trashy Orlando motel. A Wall Street trader guarding a dumpster with a speargun recalls how he lost his fiancée to a brain-damaged country crooner. At first glance, Scott Snyder’s debut story collection might strike one as yet another example of contemporary fiction’s fascination with absurdly twee, McSweeney’s-esque postmodern fables. Mix and match enough disparate elements, and voilà—instant hipster cred. Read Snyder’s Voodoo Heart carefully, though: These tales: have an uncommon power that’s built on a solid, tried-and-true storytelling style. At times recalling J.D. Salinger’s introverted obsessives, Snyder’s characters oscillate between irrational action and passive observation. Terrified by their own ability to hurt, they’re often drawn to roles that require them to protect others. That romantic pursuing the blimp—the protagonist of the opening story, “Blue Yodel”—also holds a day job watching for jumpers at Niagara Falls. The narrator of “Happy Fish, Plus Coin” dwells so much on human frailty that he takes a job at the Home Wrecker, “the world’s largest inflated house…a multiroom home that was essentially an enormous balloon for kids to bounce around inside of.” The stories, for all their fanciful eclecticism, are about fear and loss...What emerges in Voodoo Heart is a fascinating hybrid, a kind of whimsical melancholy. Snyder freely cops to having been influenced by comic books early on in life—up through high school he wanted to become an illustrator, and he did some of the drawings that appear in this collection. While his vivid, painterly feel for the strange and the surreal will probably draw comparisons to the likes of Michael Chabon, there’s a moody reflection here that feels both strikingly original and genuinely timeless. Snyder’s playfully off-kilter world might not look exactly like our own, but it’s full of a pain that is achingly familiar.




The PW review is starred, too, by the way.


About me:

Scott has been published in Zoetrope, Tin House, One-Story, Epoch, Small Spiral Notebook, and other journals. He teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence University and lives in New York with his wife, Jeanie, and his son, Jack Presley. He’s currently at work on a novel for the Dial Press.