Think of it as an early Christmas present to yourself. The perfect bedside book—as long as there’s a light left on in the...
There are pleasures aplenty in this latest doorstopper field-report from the world of unicorns, wizards, altered mental states, and magical transformations.
Inevitably, however, this ambitious gathering of 37 stories, ten poems, and a single nonfiction entry (critic Douglas E. Winter’s argumentative essay “The Pathos of Genre”) is somewhat uneven. Datlow and Windling aren’t really critics; they’re enthusiasts—and it does sometimes seem as if everything not written by Ann Beattie or Ed McBain meets their criteria for inclusion. (Is everything that’s not realistic therefore fantastic? It’s a legitimate critical crux.) That said, who wouldn’t want to encounter in one conveniently capacious volume such knockout stuff as the inexplicably underrated Delia Sherman’s atmospheric “The Parvat Ruby” (which is far superior to her wry poem “Carabosse”), newcomer Elizabeth Birmingham’s imaginative ghost story “Falling Away,” and consensus grandmaster Patricia A. McKillip’s superb “Toad” (which wryly adds sexual panic and species discrimination to the subtext of a classic fairy tale). Other deft retellings of familiar stories include N. Scott Momaday’s Native American fable “The Transformation,” Wendy Wheeler’s sensuous “Skin So Green and Fine,” and Gemma Files’s ingenious hybrid “The Emperor’s Old Clothes.” Old hands Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, and Steven Millhauser appear in fine form, and the estimable Neil Gaiman contributes both an unusually clever trick story (“Harlequin Valentine”) and a hair-raising portrayal of a preadolescent serial killer whose path to fame and fortune coolly updates Horatio Alger (“Keepsakes and Treasures: A Love Story”). A rather similar story, Michael Marshall Smith’s “What You Make It,” raises merry hell with the legend of the Pied Piper and the image of the kindly old granny. Also not to be missed: Steve Rasnic Tem’s beautifully written “Halloween Street,” Thomas Wharton’s Borgesian “The Paper-Thin Garden,” and April Seeley’s nicely conceived, poem “Mrs. Santa Decides to Move to Florida.”
Think of it as an early Christmas present to yourself. The perfect bedside book—as long as there’s a light left on in the hallway.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26274-4
Page Count: 640
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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