A supernatural tale offers a mishmash of genre tropes that never coheres.
A grandfather tells his young grandson a story about four friends in this debut novella.
Twelve-year-old Steven doesn’t want to visit his grandfather on Brushy Mountain, but this will likely be the man’s last summer there before he moves into a nursing home. He also tells exciting tales, Steven’s mother promises. Steven has a disability—“low vision,” which is not defined—and he likes to write stories and build robots. Instead of following up on these character traits or exploring Steven’s relationship with his grandfather, the novella mainly consists of a tale Grandpa tells about four friends who work in different departments at the Capitol Mall in Little Rock, Arkansas. Grandpa claims that “I was there and I know what happened,” although the part he plays never becomes clear. Still, he discloses details that he cannot have easily known; Tony, for example, saw his best friend get shot but never told anyone. Grandpa identifies another character, Mary, as autistic from “problems in the delivery room,” an unlikely cause. Kim works as a counselor, and Mark’s job involves developing a “highly toxic chemical” in the building’s basement lab. His boss, Gary, wants to hurry the process, but his interference causes a massive explosion. Severely disabled in the accident, Tony, Mark, and Kim begin experiencing supernatural “things.” The story then devolves into a hodgepodge of haunted towns, evil forces, and human sacrifice. Even though Grandpa is telling this tale to a young boy, drug and sexual references mark this as an adult novella. Inconsistencies in the text make for difficult reading; character names sometimes change spelling (from Mary to “Marry” or Tony to “Toney”) and verbs randomly shift from past to present tense. Frequent punctuation and spelling errors—“he inhales like it is a scrumptious. Stake!”—hamper readability as well. The book ends abruptly, leaving the reader puzzled as to what it was all actually about.
A supernatural tale offers a mishmash of genre tropes that never coheres.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-7342-7
Page Count: 108
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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