by David Shawn ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2016
Exuberantly irreverent; demonic beings and witches running amok have rarely been so funny.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
A small Texas town is thrown into turmoil when an upcoming Halloween party comes complete with infernal beasts and ceremonial sacrifice in this supernatural thriller.
A seemingly abandoned deputy sheriff’s car—and no deputy—is merely the start of strange happenings in Welles, Texas. Police Chief Frank Butler notes tracks leading from the car to Coventry House, home to elderly Harriet, Emma, and May. Of course, May’s not there when Butler questions the ladies, a young, sultry Megan in her stead. Rumor has it that the old women are witches, but the deputy’s disappearance could be due to his part in a federal investigation or the not-so-secret pot field on Coventry House property. Nevertheless, Megan telling Butler that “people are coming” is especially foreboding in light of the women’s forthcoming party—what they call Samhain. Sure enough, someone summons a demon, Leonard, who crawls out from below, followed by scores of Kobolos, tiny, red hat–donning creatures that look not unlike garden gnomes. Soon the chief’s dealing with a person’s head stuffed into a mailbox and rednecks battling gnomes in an all-out war and, eventually, a clash inside the local Wal-Mart. Samhain night reveals Borderland, a gate between realities where sacrifices take place. That, plus an inevitable confrontation between Leonard and the witches, is bound to result in plenty of death. The novel, despite an unmistakably cheeky approach, is decidedly adult. There’s blood, viscera, and severed heads, while Wal-Mart, as expected, stocks weapons like shotguns and saw blades. Shawn (Pantheon, 2014, etc.) delivers this in a frenzied style filled with action and zany characters while taking jabs at teen paranormal romance novels: 17-year-old Bitsy Johnson mistakes initially unseen Kobolos for abnormally speedy vampire Edward. The story’s hampered by occasionally vague descriptions (twins with a “Japanese anime schoolgirl Yakuza fashion sense”) and somewhat obscure references (someone resembling “the dead girl from the Asian horror movie, The Eye”). The final act, however, is a bevy of treats, from surprises, including the identity of acolytes who summoned Leonard, to the introduction of black magic’s counterpart in the form of Celestial, or white, magic.
Exuberantly irreverent; demonic beings and witches running amok have rarely been so funny.Pub Date: April 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5076-1806-6
Page Count: 354
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
138
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Share your opinion of this book
More by Max Brooks
BOOK REVIEW
by Max Brooks
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Share your opinion of this book
More by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.