A paranormal whodunit that offers a gripping battle between good and evil.
An aging Texas Ranger investigates a series of murders committed after an ancient, evil force is unleashed in Central Texas in McCandless’ historical horror novel.
It’s 1908, and Ranger Jewel Lightfoot is recovering from a hangover and an attempt on his life. However, his boss, Col. Al Woodard, has a new assignment for him. The bodies of four members of a farm family, recent immigrants from Sweden, have been found in their burned-out house. Only the couple’s little girl escaped the devastation to report what happened. On the grounds of the property, the local sheriff found an unusual and frightening club-shaped weapon featuring razor-sharp obsidian blades. The fire damage makes it difficult to determine the specific cause of the victims’ deaths, so Lightfoot is put on the case. First, he must pay a visit to Ernst-Michael Kitzinger at the University of Texas at Austin; he’s an expert on ancient Indigenous culture who may be able to shed some light on the mysterious club. It turns out that it’s a macahuitl—a deadly, ancient, and priceless Mayan weapon. Lightfoot becomes convinced that the farm family was murdered before the fire occurred, so he begins what becomes a violent, supernatural quest to find the killers. In this prequel to McCandless’ 2011 horror novel Sour Lake, the author combines a bit of real-life history, including Indigenous people’s fight for Yucatan independence, with a solid dose of mysticism, even adding in a poignant love story for good measure. He also presents vivid descriptions of bleak landscapes and unspeakable brutality. He even manages a touch of humor, as in this sketch of the pompous Kitzinger: “his face seemed custom-made for wedging into cracks and crevices.” Lightfoot comes off as a remarkable tragic hero who’s tormented by visions of people he’s killed, unable to express emotion when it counts, and relentlessly driven to destroy a demon and his acolytes.
A paranormal whodunit that offers a gripping battle between good and evil.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Ninth Planet Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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