A skillfully rendered, if wearisome, thriller.
In this debut novel, a man wrongly imprisoned because of his resemblance to an escaped convict stumbles on an even darker conspiracy.
Greg is a model of mediocrity and happy underachievement—he’s always managed to just get by, living a life of “complacent dignity.” He becomes fascinated by the folklore surrounding an old, abandoned building that apparently houses something sinister, and he decides to investigate and maybe gather material worthy of a podcast. But he passes out suddenly, and awakes in what appears to be a hospital, though staffed with peculiarly unfriendly, taciturn nurses. Dr. Carver, a congenial but slippery character who seems to be in charge, informs Greg that they found him unconscious just outside the “facility,” which he unreassuringly describes as “a joint mental health and correctional facility that implements the lifestyle of a monastery.” Carver confesses that while Greg doesn’t belong there, he can’t simply be released. An inmate who bears a striking resemblance to him escaped. Carver wants to keep Greg incarcerated to placate potentially riotous prisoners and fend off the authorities. Kherbash adroitly conjures an atmosphere of menacing uncertainty—as Greg attempts to escape, he begins to reckon that Carver is experimenting on the patients in some sepulcher fashion. A shooting on the grounds creates an opportunity for a prison break, and Greg joins forces with a crew of inmates intent on escaping. But he’s flummoxed by his inability to distinguish between reality and his drug-induced hallucinations, a demarcation artfully kept ambiguous by the author. Who are these “singing sirens” Greg keeps hearing? And what are the strangely terrifying creatures that seem to haunt the building’s crawl spaces? The downside of Kherbash’s intentional injection of nebulousness into the plot is its inaccessibility—readers will have to make effortful and sometimes tedious strides to penetrate a nearly opaque story. Some readers may feel that the short novel is not worth the labor—as a whole, the plot is still presented within the grooves of a timeworn formula, a track from which it never really departs.
A skillfully rendered, if wearisome, thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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