by Bruce Dundore ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Managing to be fun in spite of a bleak storyline, the novel is worthy of comparison to wacky/sad futures such as Gary...
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From author Dundore (The Seduction Diet, 2011) comes a sci-fi novel about a bizarre future and one strange man.
When John Smith awakes from a coma, he can’t remember much about his life. Suffering from erectile dysfunction, he also can’t achieve an erection without the aid of a mechanical device. His girlfriend, Marsha, doesn’t seem to mind. Living in a futuristic America that has been rocked by a series of calamities (ranging from plagues to nuclear attacks to a variety of inferior goods), the couple has weathered much worse. After a pack of steroid-enhanced coyotes attacks John, however, his subsequent loss of an arm puts a great strain on the relationship. Believing that his limb will simply grow back, John appears insane to nearly everyone but himself. Since he has no friends to bother with his belief in a regenerating arm (“I don’t have friends. I have doctors and a girlfriend, and those relationships are tenuous at best”), the burden of suffering through such imagination falls mostly on Marsha and John’s dog, Lassie. As fingers begin to emerge from John’s shoulder, the pending question seems to be: Just how crazy is John compared with the madness around him? With a future world that may be too on-the-nose for some (“ticketists” write tickets for all sorts of violations, professional sports have gone ultraviolent, and don’t even bother taking the Suri Cruise Cruiseway), the book nevertheless manages a deep creativity and empathetic protagonist. John may have lost an arm, but he isn’t one to complain about it; he’ll just grow another. Likewise, his relationship may not be one full of passion, but when the alternative is the bleakness of an outside world where packs of enhanced coyotes roam, who can blame John and Marsha for the time they spend together? Frequently sexual (one woman’s business card has a picture of her vagina on it), occasionally gruesome and dotted with spurts of genuine humor, the story culminates in a surprisingly sweet ending.
Managing to be fun in spite of a bleak storyline, the novel is worthy of comparison to wacky/sad futures such as Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2011).Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
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New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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