By turns entertaining, poignant, and heady, a thoroughly enjoyable thrill ride powered by jolts of philosophy.
Through contact with interdimensional beings, a former Black Power activist releases a “thought-virus” that turns dogs wild and people into jackal-headed creatures resembling the ancient Egyptian god Anubis.
Edwards’ (The Dreams of Devils, 2012, etc.) second installment of the Nightscape series is a thinking man’s horror tale replete with associative memories, literary allusion, intellectual discourse, and references to Hegel, Plato, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Sartre, and Athanasius Kircher, to name a few. Unlike some run-of-the-mill zombie apocalypses, this well-written, multilayered tale has depth and complexity; when people transform into monsters, it feels more like Ionesco’s Rhinoceros than Night of the Living Dead. The narrative begins by introducing various groups of characters, from cops to gangsters, dogcatchers to street people, all crafted into empathetic personalities, each ultimately facing the catastrophe. Sick and dying, Gaston, aka “Mister,” spends much of his time in a dream state in which he claims to communicate with telepathic aliens from the Sirius star system. Though even Mister doubts his own sanity, he hopes to trick the aliens and use their powers for some kind of race revolution, a plan he discusses with Khonsu, a street person who dispenses cerebral books to various inhabitants of the inner city. Meanwhile, as Detroit descends into a seething hellscape à la Hieronymus Bosch and the military begins shooting everyone on sight via drones, a supersecret black ops team with extensive knowledge of alien and interdimensional goings-on is working to remedy the situation while other cognoscenti attempt to foil them. Ultimately, from all this confusion and mayhem, an unlikely hero emerges. Edwards is a master of character building, and as random people morph into beasts, those left behind tend to ponder their inner landscapes as much as their outrageous circumstances. The intriguing, sometimes-confusing highbrow discourse adds a shade of believability to the pseudo-scientific psychobabble used to explain the unfolding chaos.
By turns entertaining, poignant, and heady, a thoroughly enjoyable thrill ride powered by jolts of philosophy.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9897487-3-5
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Imperiad Entertainment
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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