by Eric Lundgren ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2013
A hollow satire working so very hard at being clever that it forgets to deliver any emotional truth.
When a mezzo-soprano star of the local opera disappears, her worrywart husband must explore the depths of a bizarre and labyrinthine city for clues to her whereabouts.
Some debut manuscripts are better left in desk drawers. That’s not to say that librarian-by-day Lundgren’s debut is without certain merits. The writer clearly has some syntactical skill, and his experiment in worldbuilding is ambitious. However, a seriously disagreeable narrator and a gloss of highbrow humor take the shine off this slice of literary absurdity quickly. Our narrator is Sven Norberg, a schlubby, smoking cubicle jockey who lives in the fictional city of Trude. Trude is a really weird amalgam of Midwestern highways and shopping malls punctuated with bizarre European-influenced behemoths designed by a mysterious architect named Bernhard. It’s a city that has barricaded its libraries, creating a secretive underground of armed librarians, and it’s, conversely, one that is obsessed with opera and other forms of high culture. Its superstar was Norberg’s wife, Molly, who disappeared with no warning, leaving Sven to raise their teenage son, Kyle. Things happen—Sven starts sleeping with a very young girl named Plea; Kyle falls under the influence of a cultlike church; and clues to Molly’s whereabouts start appearing in coded entries in the local newspaper. Later, a woman named Cassandra indicates to Sven that she may have clues to Molly’s frame of mind. But none of it ever goes anywhere. It’s as if the author is introducing odd situations and absurd events simply to shout at readers how terribly witty it all is. When asked for guidance from his son, Sven answers bluntly. “As I see it, the point is to endure as much shit as you can without any illusions,” he says. Add on to all of this an ambiguous, confusing denouement, and the final product is a pretentious, frustrating mess.
A hollow satire working so very hard at being clever that it forgets to deliver any emotional truth.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0687-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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.
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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
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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
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