An unflinching but introspective tale of what happens after death.
In Spencer’s debut novel, a deceased man’s spirit helps souls escape their expiring bodies.
Williams may be dead but his soul lives on. Another spirit named Henreich, who appears to be a teenage boy, is there to tutor him on his new afterlife profession. Williams and Henreich are Sadeiests—a title that’s a portmanteau of the words sadist and poltergeist. They help trapped souls depart bodies that are on the verge of death; if a soul doesn’t manage to do so before the body’s demise, then it dies, as well. The job can be a harrowing ordeal, as when they aid victims of a vicious serial killer named Sinclair. Henreich quickly grasps that Williams is special when one woman’s soul shows him the life that she lived with her ailing husband—an apparently unprecedented occurrence. In a concurrent story, Death meets 12-year-old John, who can see precisely when and how people will die. He tells the boy, whom he calls “Harbinger,” about the Seven Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Death is one of them, of course, but it’s the other six who wish to battle one another until only two remain, with mortals as “collateral damage.” Spencer’s dense narrative also sublimely addresses abstract notions, such as redemption—each saved soul lessens the Sadeiests’ accumulated sin, which gradually makes them look younger. The novel can be cheeky at times, but it’s more often profound, as Williams develops growing empathy for the dying. The deaths themselves tend to be brutal, however, in part due to Sinclair’s regular appearances. The author’s concise prose ably introduces myriad characters but keeps some of them mysterious. As a result, questions linger at the end, although Spencer may be saving the answers for a planned sequel. Dyer’s crisp, black-and-white line art concludes each chapter—a remnant of the book’s genesis as an unrealized graphic novel. Although the events in the text and illustrations don’t match up, the wordless panels reveal early incarnations of Williams and Henreich.
An unflinching but introspective tale of what happens after death.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-69-100788-0
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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