scott

I'm a writer --my first collection of short stories, Voodoo Heart, is out right now from Dial Press. I'm very nervous and excited about this... The book is in stores (Borders, B&N), but also available at:
Voodoo Heart at Powells Books
Voodoo Heart at Amazon
Voodoo Heart at B & N
I spent a year after college working at Disney World, where I was employed as a janitor, a rollerskating janitor, and a character. (I was Pluto, Eyeore, and Buzz Lightyear.)
ABOUT THE BOOK:
the stories are about people knocked off course in life, mostly by love. better to show than tell, i guess...i posted some in my blog entries. love to hear what you think. if you want more, just tell me and i'd be happy to e-mail them to you personally.
Or, if you're interested in reviewing the book for a paper, magazine, blog...or doing a profile of some kind, just let me know. be happy to send materials!
Also, if you'd like me to do a reading at your bookstore or visit your bookclub or do anything really, just let me know...
My official author website , where i also post, is VOODOOHEART.COM
PRAISE:
Scott Snyder's Voodoo Heart just blew me away. These dispatches from disaffected but strangely likeable American oddities have much the same effect as good American roots music: their simplicity is deceptive, their emotional power considerable. And at some point between the mystery-blimp of "Blue Yodel" and the World War I-era Curtis Jenny of "The Star Attraction of 1919," you may discover that Snyder's plain folks have stolen your heart. I think what impressed me most about these stories--even the ones in which terrible things happen--was their warmth and humanity. Even when his characters are at their worst, Scott Snyder never abandons them. These are stories that welcome the reader in, and fully reward his interest. Sometimes horrifying, often absurd, full of characters afraid to commit (and who sometimes commit anyway), this is a debut worthy of T. Coraghessan Boyle's If The River Was Whiskey. I couldn't put it down."
-- Stephen King
Filled with wonder and sometimes dark, other times sweet, these delightful stories might seem at first to be transcribed from a further world, one in which the logic with which we are most familiar seems no longer to exist, or to have been cut asunder. In spending more time with them, however, a reader soon becomes comfortable with their consistent logic, and begins to recognize certain truths that could be found by no other means than through the acquaintance of these wonderful stories. Voodoo Heart, like Scott Snyder, is a real find.
-- Rick Bass, author of The Diezmo
"Each story in Scott Snyder's Voodoo Heart is as mournful and beautiful and haunting as a Hank Williams song, or a Buster Keaton movie, or a dream you have on the edge of sleep: vivid, insistent, funny, strange, heartbreaking all at the same time, full of odd, doomed love, and unforgettable."

-- Elizabeth McCracken, author of Niagara Falls All Over Again
"These stories draw us into a slightly aletered universe. You read them and find yourself in the maze of a carnival: everything is funny, frightening, and hopeful all at the same time...Believe me: you have never read such astounding and beautiful stories."
-- Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of An Almost Perfect Moment
"This collection aches with an iridescent beauty. These stories are as fine as bees wingsvibrating with irresistible charm and mystery. With Voodoo Heart, Scott Snyder casts a wonderful spell upon his readers, leaving us forever transfigured...After reading these enchantingly irresistible stories, I am absolutely convinced that Scott Snyder is the secret love child of my heros, Steven Millhauser and Flannery O'Connor. And if he's not their love child, at the very least, he is the heir apparent to their strange and magical thrones."
-- Will Clarke, author of Lord Vishnu's Love Handles and The Worthy
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 Publishers Weekly
* Starred Review.
Reviewed by Francine Prose
Reading Scott Snyder's accomplished first story collection, Voodoo Heart, is a little like watching a magician pull rabbits out of a hat. No matter how many times you've seen the trick performed, you still marvel that someone has figured out not only how to do it but, more important, how to persuade the audience that no one has ever done it exactly that way before. Snyder's particular sleight of hand enables him to make the unlikely seem disturbingly familiar; he bends and stretches the laws of ordinary causality just enough so that, when his narratives snap back, there's a twang that reverberates after the final line. His protagonists are young romantics worried about the conflict between authenticity and adventurousness, torn between a self-protective longing for solitude and a longing for some deeper loyalty to another human being. What they mistake for life-changing passion may turn out to be simpleand terriblemisunderstanding, and a chance encounter may initiate a chain of events that will alter them forever. Many reside just outside odd or intentional communities (a boot camp for troubled teens, a summer haven for overweight kids) in which they take an almost anthropological interest. Others are in transit or in flight, reluctant to confront that what looked like a whimsical job opportunity or a brief vacation from ordinary life may in fact be a permanent dead end.In the title story, a young couple renovates an abandoned Florida mansion that borders on a women's prisona proximity that intensifies the hero's most secret and desperate concerns about his true nature. In another tale, an equally conflicted young man meets a celebrity convalescing from drastic plastic surgery and becomes involved in a meteoric affair that flames out as her recovery changes his sense of what it means to be injured. In "Dumpster Tuesday," a guy who seems to have everything (or just enough) loses it all when his girlfriend leaves him for a brain-damaged, improbably charismatic country singer, and in "About Face," a trumpet player working at a juvenile detention center learns a painful lesson about illness, compassion and the mysteries of sex.Suffused with sly humor, sympathy and high spirits, the stories in Voodoo Heart are giddy with the thrill of discovering what can be done with words, what you can make happen on the page. The result is as irreducible and rewarding as making playing cards disappear or pulling gold coins out of thin air.
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 Booklist:
* Starred Review
Reviewed by Emily Cook
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 fiancée, 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 the June/July issue of the Believer:
Reviewed by John Glassie
More writers seem to be working over there toward the unreal end of things, near the place where, for instance, Donald Antrims hundred brothers and George Saunderss theme-park cavemen live in splendor. But its a deceptively tricky thing to do well. Invention can pretty easily turn gratuitous if youre not careful; freedom from the constraints of the real world carries with it a heavy responsibility to justify its exercise. In his entirely enjoyable and justifiably inventive debut collection, Scott Snyder works in the area of the unlikely, as opposed to that of the utterly impossible, focusing his imagination on what could happen if the axis of the earth were tilted by just a few more fractions of a degree. In the majority of cases he does this in service of a love story, often with the result of showing us something we can recognize in ourselves. As Snyder points out, theres a lot of bizarre stuff already in existence. When the ungrounded young man in Happy Fish, Plus Coin goes looking for a job along the highway galaxy outside Orlandos Disney World, he finds himself considering the following options: Gator World, Flea World, Orange World (housed inside a huge graying orange), Orlandos Pawn World, World of Thrills, World of Tees, Scary World. Snyder engages in a certain amount of gentle satire about all kinds of contemporary phenomena including fat camps, cosmetic surgery, and the culture of celebrity, but most of his head shaking comes in the form of fascination rather than cynicism. Of course, nothing causes more head shaking, or more fascination, than love, and appropriately enough its when people in Snyders stories begin to experience the emotional complexities of romance and relationships, as almost all of them do, that the strange things in the world around them come together to get just a little stranger. The amusing path of the title story, for example, which is ultimately about the nature of commitment, leads through circumstances that connect an exhibit of the almost prehistoric sea life from the deepest levels of the ocean, an oddly affordable old mansion, a country-club prison for high-profile female felons, and the possible paranormal ability of one inmate to tell whether at core youre a good person. Dumpster Tuesday, which depicts a love triangle of sorts, involves a brain-damaged country music star, a spear gun, and, yes, a dumpster. About Face, a story of jealousy, includes a juvenile boot camp, kidney dialysis, and a horse named Captain Marvel. But listing the elements like this doesnt convey the easy way in which they come into play; its about as easy, say, as the way feelings of attachment can turn into mildly psychotic obsession. Snyder takes you down the rabbit hole, but the experience can be surprisingly subtle. And only the work itself can show how he manages to employ these elements to get to a place where a weighty last lineHere, I said, pressing her palm hard over my heart. Herecan come off just as lovely as can be. The stories in this collection arent all entirely of a piece. Two of them, the first and last, are set in the first decade of the last century, during the amazing early days of flight. But for my money, the more or less amazing thing is what Snyder does in the others. He plays with reality but steers away from a feeling of contrivance and somehow, instead, through a recalculation of the plausible, evokes the way we encounter each other in the world.
From strandbooks.com
Strangely amusing and amusingly strange, the stories in Scott Snyder's "Voodoo Heart" tip-toe the line between fantasy and deranged. For starters, there's the Wall Street trader, speargun in hand, diligently guarding a dumpster outsidea Florida pawnshop; and the guy at Niagara Falls who has to watch for jumpers, scurrying away in a car after a blimp that contains his escaped girlfriend. We also find a star actress hiding out after surgery, only to have her affair with a salesman take a turn for the worse as she begins to heal. Filled to the brim with twisted humor and wondrous characters, "Voodoo Heart" will bewitch all in its path.
From The Baltimore Sun:
July 11th
Voodoo Heart, Scott Snyder's debut collection, is as the title implies: quirky and disturbing. Fraught with characters yearning for escape but unable to achieve it, because one simply can't outrun one's self, Voodoo Heart often pivots on the ache left by ineffable yearning or on the shock of unwanted self-discovery. In "Blue Yodel," Preston Bristol drives across the country in 1918 chasing a blimp carrying his fiancee, Claire, whom he met in a wax museum. Pres works at Niagara Falls, searching out people bent on going over in barrels. Some are saved, yanked from the barrels and slapped hard to shake them out of their mesmerized state. Pres isn't so lucky as he barrels into emotional rapids; there's no one to slap him as he travels cross country, a pistol and map on the seat beside him, seeking Claire and the blimp, a contraption no one he meets has ever heard of, finding clues only he can divine. "Wreck" features a 26-year-old loner who spends his days in the woods with his blind cat and a metal detector in a quiet resort town known mostly for fishing and a fat farm for kids. A famous woman arrives to recover from a serious accident, her once-beautiful face torn apart. At first their association is limited by her fear of adulation, but he's too hermitic to know who she is. The tentative friendship blossoms into a full-fledged affair. But as her face begins to heal, each feels the knitting of her wounds as an unraveling of their relationship. The diadem of the collection is the title story, a long exposition about a house that is indeed haunted - by the women's prison next door. A man and his girlfriend take on the gorgeous yet oddly inexpensive white elephant as a renovation project, only to have it wrench them apart as he becomes obsessed with the women next door. Snyder has a remarkable ability to career through the interior landscape without ever veering off course. Like Abbott, he knows his characters well - even though many of them have lived decades earlier, sometimes in places that don't actually exist. The language of Voodoo Heart is keen and full, rich and textured; the images Snyder depicts are startling, yet somehow intensely believable...Voodoo Heart [is a collection] to be read, savored, returned to...Snyder is a new voice to be listened for again and again.
From TimeOut: NY:
June 27th
Reviewed by Bilge Ebiri
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.
From TimeOut: Chicago:
June 17th
Reviewed by A.B. Drea
...Snyder writes with a vivid imagination, constructing his tales using inventive details and seamless transitions...He constantly surprises with a unique insight...Other than rare references to ear-piece cell phones and flat-screened TVs, the stories are full of country music, 150-year-old mansions and historical aircrafts. What is new is Snyder's ability to tell timeless tales about unusual characters with his unique mix of humor and drama.
From Moorishgirl.com
Reviewed by Katrina Denza
...This collection is filled with delicious oddities. One man's hair has a white streak from being shot in the head as a boy; one girl's skin itches so much she has to take a brush to it; a woman throws personal items out of a blimp like crumbs for her boyfriend to follow; a man has a nose that whistles in the wind; and shards of glass leak out of the skin around a woman's eyes...Snyder does such a great job of grounding the reader in vibrant natural settings and characters' authentic emotions that these items eventually become not so much unusual as organic to the stories. Even with all the missteps these characters make, all the dark tendencies and unluckiness they seem to share, the main emotional landscape rendered in these seven stories is love. These men are brave enough to go for the dream of love, and even when it's tried and lost, they're left better people for it. Scott Snyder is a writer I will be watching in the future.
From KGB Lit:
Reviewed by John McCaffrey
Scott Snyder’s new story collection, Voodoo Heart, is an ensemble that trumpets the arrival of an inspired and imaginative young American writer. The book, Snyder’s first, is comprised of seven independent pieces—the majority of whom have enjoyed previous literary life in journals such as Zoetrope: All Story; One-Story; Epoch; and Tin House. Under one spine, however, these stories meld together seamlessly, like a fantastic Tapas meal where each new arriving dish brings fresh sensation to the taste buds, but at the end the feeling inside the stomach is one of integrated contentment. What’s most striking about Voodoo Heart is Snyder’s dogged ability to stay on point, relentlessly so, when dissecting the conscious and subconscious emotions and motivations of the male characters that dominate his pieces. Utilizing two primary backdrops of time—early 20th century and early 21st century—and a series of American backwoods towns and strip-mall depleted suburbs, each sharing the sweet simplicity of being cast aside and forgotten, Snyder proceeds to bombard these men with such a diverse and unexpected array of soul-stripping stimuli that one nearly wants to leap into the pages and offer up safe shelter. In About Face, for instance, the third story of the collection, we meet Miles Fergus, who, at the age of 29, must deal with the effects of a childhood accident where a bullet shot from a marathon-starter’s gun fell to earth atop his head, nearly splitting open his skull and causing a hole inside his septum that results in a melodic whistle now and then. “Can you hear it yourself?” Williams asked, still peering up into my nose. “It’s like tooot. Toooot.” Miles is also a bit humiliated by a failed attempt at heroics, when he mistakenly pummeled what he thought was a bandit stabbing an old lady in the ear; actually the man was her son just testing her hearing aid. And, the clincher, the woman Miles loves, the kidney-failing adult daughter of a Sergeant at the Juvenile Boot Camp he works as part-time trumpeter (revelry), part-time chauffer, a wan beauty whom he ferries once a week to a far-away hospital to have her blood cleaned by a dialysis machine, chooses one of the camp’s most insidious inmates over him to be her boyfriend. But all the torment has a purpose, as at the end of the tale we accept the idea, even welcome the fact, that Miles can be fulfilled in a diminished role, peacefully laconic toiling at a unfrequented museum, giving information to bored schoolchildren and playing mournful trumpet at the end of the day to an exhibit of a prehistoric man, whose evolutionary choice of a powerful chewing jaw over a developed brain doomed him and his hyper-masticating brethren to extinction. Perhaps Snyder’s message in Voodoo Heart is akin: that greatness in life does not come from one being great, but rather in one accepting they are not great. Simply, Snyder reveals his characters’ flaws in such a way that these flaws, in the end, are their strengths.Snyder has the good timing and strength of craft to tether the most surreal moments in his stories to the most tangible. He accomplishes this through his gritty but poetic style of describing place, revealing a desperate but beautiful American landscape. He writes, “In the winter the ice is so thick it glows blue. You can hear it slowing rolling forward at night, splitting and pushing on, making noises like grinding teeth,” in Wreck. This landscape acts more like a willing participant than silent partner. For example, somehow, in Blue Yodel, it makes sense that Pres would be hired to sit near the tip of Niagara Falls helping to fish would be jumpers—floating by inside barrels—out of the churning water. As it’s perfectly natural for Pres, at the end of the story, to swing suspended in the air, floating in the clouds over the arid and crusted Arizona earth, clinging to a rope attached to a zeppelin carrying his wayward girlfriend inside.Snyder, I believe, has helped to redefine the American pastoral novel with Voodoo Heart. Like Fenimore Cooper long before him, he has shown an ability to use the American landscape—be it paved in cement or sprinkled with pine needles—as a means to shed light on our society. And like Cooper, his writing is crisp and clean but poignant and meaningful. And they stay with you, even if it hurts. Like the country song his character Max in Dumpster Tuesday describes, a song about two love-starved truckers (a man and woman) who can never seem to meet, only converse by CB. “…The woman eats at a truck stop, and the man comes in so soon after her that when he unknowingly sits down on her stool, her tip money is still on the counter. The change is still warm from her pocket.”Snyder’s stories are still warm in my pocket. I’m sure they’ll be there for a long while.