A promising premise and intriguing core characters but, ultimately, not enough cohesion between the plots to stick them all...
A post-apocalyptic sci-fi Western, short story writer Carr’s (The Shape of Every Monster Yet To Come, 2014, etc.) debut novel traces a brief and hobbled journey across the enduring landscape of the end of the world.
Around the year 2017, a terrible new addiction afflicted humanity. People discovered they could sip shadows, ingesting a darkness more powerful than the strongest drug. Predictably, the other side of the high is abuse, withdrawal, desperation, depravity. In short order, society crumbles; tribalism reigns; all becomes violence and stark waste. A century and a half later, the addiction has come to its finale. In the precisely realized landscape of southern Texas, Mira (the daughter of a shadow-stolen mother), Murk (an appealingly foul, shadow-addict amputee), and Bale (a "domer" raised in a hermetically sealed settlement that eliminates natural light) embark on a muddled quest across the Texas scrub to…do something. Ostensibly, their mission is clear—they must find and kill Joe Clover, the addict who stole Mira’s mother’s shadow, before Halley’s comet returns—but, as with so much else in this exuberant book, their motive is overwhelmed by the sheer number of characters and side plots. We meet the ferocious women of the Shadowless Army; the Faulkner-ian Doc; the Dr. Strangelove–esque Capt. Flamsteed; Bale’s doomed brother, Drummond, and more and more and more besides. This, coupled with an uneven tone which borrows just as heavily from Flannery O’Connor as it does from Chuck Palahniuk and an even more unfortunate tendency toward the exploitative grotesque (amputees are an endless source of sight gags and are sometimes beaten to death with their own peg legs; a saloon piano player is a waddling one-eyed midget possessing a “voice, quasi-maniacal”), conspires to create a book whose allegiances tend toward the shock and awe of its conceit and shy away from the coherent development of either its world or its main characters.
A promising premise and intriguing core characters but, ultimately, not enough cohesion between the plots to stick them all together.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61695-827-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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