When bandit attacks on traveling caravans grow worse, Capt. Auriga of the Eastern Trade Caravan Company talks of smashing...
In this fantasy novel, a simple caravan guard’s commitment to a dead friend leads him into a fight in an isolated town.
When bandit attacks on traveling caravans grow worse, Capt. Auriga of the Eastern Trade Caravan Company talks of smashing the bandits’ stronghold, located in an isolated valley quite close to his own home village. But when Auriga dies—by hitting his head during a race—the novel’s nameless narrator decides to continue this quest without Auriga. He finds a murkier situation in Dracheburg Valley than he expected, including a baron who long ago retreated from his responsibilities and an organized group of bandits who’ve recruited many erstwhile caravan guards. The town is populated by fearful or double-dealing people, including a shady sheriff and a saloon full of ne’er-do-wells. Meanwhile, a seemingly helpful criminal has a secret agenda regarding magical shards that are also the object of a wizard’s quest. (There’s even a major local infestation of bears.) The novel’s premise is an intriguing hybrid of fantasy and Western tropes, complete with an undertaker who measures the hero for a coffin. The author keeps the pace moving, and the characters’ “shades of gray” morality will likely keep readers interested—and unsure of whom to trust. However, the book presents some hurdles, including its language: Caravan guards in a medieval world use words like “ideology” and “feedback,” and when the narrator grows sick of the scheming around him, he tells the sheriff, “You and I are going to have a serious discussion,” sounding more like a TV dad than a swordsman. The novel also struggles with a rambling, chapterless structure, in which the narrator stumbles into one quest after another. The looseness may be intended to give the book a less epic and more realistic feeling, but it creates an environment in which the narrator doesn’t even mention his near-amnesia until page 59.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482026467
Page Count: 312
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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