A rare book that blends fun with fury and tomfoolery with social consciousness.
Stories that borrow from American folklore, history, and a plethora of literary sources to forge fantasy worlds that are intimately familiar.
Duncan (The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, 2012, etc.) reasserts his down-home voice in this new collection of Southern fabulist tales. Often told in the first person, the stories tease the reader with echoes of historical fact and biography that slowly unfold into sociopolitical commentary. In some tales, this cultural consciousness is overt. The title story, for example, sees an actual agent of Thomas More’s fictional Utopia infiltrating 16th-century London in an attempt to rescue More from the Tower. When her mission fails, she becomes haunted by the profane voice of More’s severed head and stays in England in an attempt to find the freedom offered by an imperfect society. Along the same lines, “Senator Bilbo” finds the many-times-great-grandson of Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins a powerful political figure in the Shire advancing his agenda of racial purity in the face of a globalizing Middle-earth. Other stories flirt more subtly with their themes. In “Zora and the Zombie,” a fictionalized Zora Neale Hurston explores both the power and vulnerability of her femininity while researching her real-life ethnographic study of Haitian voodoo practices. In “Beluthahatchie,” the African-American trickster character High John the Conqueror is blended with the scarcely less mythic personality of bluesman Robert Johnson to explore the dynamics of institutionalized racial oppression and resistance in hell. As lofty as Duncan’s goals can sometimes be, the tenderness, humor, and sheer gumption of his voices make the collection both winsome and engaging. Of note, however, is the fact that the author uses racially insensitive language which, while historically accurate and appropriate to the voices of his characters, is not his to speak. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether Duncan's use of African-American folk forms and the stories' firm championing of the oppressed justify the employment of language that lands so harshly on the ear. Occasionally, the author loses his way in the maze of his references, and the stories suffer from a tendency to ramble, but even the most gabby of these tales has the power to startle the reader into realizations about their own time and place that are only possible when seen through the lens of make-believe.
A rare book that blends fun with fury and tomfoolery with social consciousness.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61873-153-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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