Unsatisfying, both as suspense and as an inquiry into our violent impulses.
Will a family camping trip turn deadly? Don’t hold your breath. Percy’s first novel, after two story collections (Refresh, Refresh, 2007, etc.), is a painfully slow tease.
Percy returns to the high desert and dense woods of central Oregon for his study of the Caves family. They live in Bend. There’s old man Paul, the hands-on owner of a company that builds cabins; his son Justin, burnt-out high-school English teacher, married to Karen, a dietitian; and Graham, their 12-year-old. They’ve been having problems. Paul’s recent heart attack has intensified his blustering machismo; Karen’s miscarriage has soured their marriage. Paul wants to revive a family tradition: a hunting expedition to Echo Canyon. It’s their last chance before the canyon disappears, victim of a major development. So the three males set off, leaving Karen behind; she loathes her father-in-law. A dark outcome is foreshadowed. There’s a TV report of a grizzly mauling two teenage girls, and a hostile local who resents these citified intruders. Justin finds a rotting corpse in the woods. At night, he can’t shake the feeling that they’re being watched; and what’s that sniffing outside the tent? These are standard come-ons. Back in Bend, a creepy vet is stalking Karen, and the Echo Canyon developer, more forthrightly, is trying to seduce her; both attempts fizzle, as the vet is felled by a migraine and the developer loses his dentures. These secondary story lines distract from the hunting expedition, where not all the drama is external. Paul, unmoored by the disappearance of his greatest love, his hunting dog, is itching for a fight with his son, who he sees as a wimp; his hostility explodes into a knockdown, drag-out fight. The author’s point about our primitive selves is a stale one, shackled to stereotypes. As for the great showdown between man and beast, it’s delayed until almost the end.
Unsatisfying, both as suspense and as an inquiry into our violent impulses.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55597-569-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
