A bleak and haunting multigenre tale.
In this paranormal novel, a woman discovers she has mysterious ties to a handsome but bewildering stranger.
It was Elisabeth’s idea to backpack in Ireland with her fiance, Josh. But the trip and her engagement end prematurely when she finds definitive proof that Josh has been unfaithful. She goes off on her own and takes a tumble in the woods only to have an apparent dream of a dragon abducting her. This is especially troubling, as she’s had a lifelong recurring dream of a dragon proclaiming she is his and the two living together in immortality. Elisabeth awakens in the village of Oakshire, where a “healer,” Constantine, is tending to her injury from the fall. He’s certainly attractive, but Elisabeth keeps her distance, as she’s fresh out of the turbulent relationship with Josh. But Constantine seduces her: He may have genuine feelings for her, having lost the woman he loved to murder. Elisabeth, meanwhile, just wants to get home to Philadelphia, but with a flooded road and no cell service, it doesn’t appear she’s going anywhere soon. Although fate may have connected her dreams with Constantine’s past, he has a shocking plan for Elisabeth. While surprises await Elisabeth, Drighton provides enough clues that readers will predict most of them. But this is the striking story’s essence: a relentless dread, with unpleasantness seeming inevitable. As in her preceding novel, The Ghosts of Winworth Manor (2019), the author writes erotic scenes tinged with a sense of uneasiness. Although her straightforward prose gives explicit erotica a romantic overtone, readers will be aware of something dark in certain characters’ motivations. Even dubious individuals get the spotlight (and perhaps sympathy) in the ominous narrative’s episodes, from the backstory of Constantine’s lost love to Josh’s post-breakup encounter that ultimately links to the main plot. Despite the memorable ending implying a possible sequel, this engrossing novel works as a stand-alone.
A bleak and haunting multigenre tale.Pub Date: May 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68470-207-7
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A gemlike, melancholy novel infused with personal and national history.
A ghost haunts a Tokyo train station, with history and tragedy much on his mind.
Kazu, the late narrator of Yu’s second novel to be translated into English, spent his life as an itinerant laborer, one of eight children who moved from his home in Fukushima to help build facilities for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Fukushima was the epicenter of the 2011 nuclear power-plant disaster, which also plays into the story.) Kazu recalls pieces of his life in digressive fashion as he wanders the grounds of a homeless encampment near a busy Tokyo train station. He listens in on conversations and recalls how he himself wound up residing there. His mood is scattered (“noises, colors, and smells are all mixed up, gradually fading away, shrinking”), but it’s soon clear in this brief, piercing novel that Kazu is circling around a series of heartbreaks, and when Yu finally hits on them—Kazu's separation from his family for work, the death of his son, the financial desperation that led to his homelessness—the novel gains a pathos and focus that justify its more abstract and lyrical early passages. As Kazu chronicles the funeral rites and his own fallen fortunes, the novel becomes a somber cross section of Japanese society, from the underclass to salarymen to the royal family to the homeless people subject to the whims of government (like the potential closure of the camp due to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics). Yu’s first novel in English, Gold Rush (2002), was a hyperviolent, American Psycho–esque tale of Yokohama street youth. This more restrained and mature novel is a subtle series of snapshots of “someone who has lost the capacity to exist, now ceaselessly thinking, ceaselessly feeling.”
A gemlike, melancholy novel infused with personal and national history.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08802-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Kepnes, whose previous novels deftly dealt with obsessive love, changes gears here and injects into this "Beauty and the...
The mysterious return of a kidnapped boy is more curse than blessing in this novel—which is equal parts love story, thriller, and horror tale.
In Nashua, New Hampshire, young teen Jon Bronson is the sort of boy who loves newspapers and hamsters and takes the long way to school to avoid bullies. He also loves fellow teen and popular budding artist Chloe Sayers, though he never admits as much. Kepnes (Hidden Bodies, 2016, etc.) nails the tentative feelings that develop between kids from different middle school social strata. When Jon vanishes one morning—it’s revealed early on that his kidnapper is local substitute teacher Roger Blair—the relative speed with which the town’s interest wanes is nearly as devastating as his disappearance, a narrative trick Kepnes pulls off seamlessly. Four years later, a more muscular Jon emerges from the local mall with no memory of his captivity and a new obsession with the work of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly the novel The Dunwich Horror, which features a man named Wilbur Whateley, with whom Jon begins to identify. Soon after Jon's return, strange things begin happening to the people around him, from getting nosebleeds to fainting and even having a fatal heart attack. Jon disappears again, voluntarily this time, fearing that, like Wilbur, he’s the monster whose mere presence causes sickness and death. Kepnes follows Jon, Chloe, and Charles "Eggs" DeBenedictus, a detective from Providence, Rhode Island, over the years as they live their separate but interconnected lives: Jon in Providence under two assumed names; Chloe in New York City as an artist who shot to fame with her initial paintings of Jon during his disappearance; and Eggs as he investigates a series of seemingly unlinked heart-attack deaths of young people. As the three come closer to one another and are repelled by either choice or circumstances, the question of sacrificing love for safety becomes painfully clear to everyone.
Kepnes, whose previous novels deftly dealt with obsessive love, changes gears here and injects into this "Beauty and the Beast"–like story a deeper allegory about how far we’ll go to protect the things we love the most.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59143-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Lenny
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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