A leisurely opening is mere preparation for the fierce struggle to follow—and it’s more than worth the wait.
A college student’s visions may be effective in a battle against demons in Baldwin’s (Fathers House, 2013) supernatural thriller.
Nineteen-year-old Kallie Hunt has been waking up most mornings with a strange sense of déjà vu. These feelings are so disturbing that she seeks help from the Rev. Johnny Swag. Swag, who belongs to the Alliance of Initiates, a secret subset of the United Religions Organizations, suspects that Kallie is a Rememberer—someone with an ability to see “past life cycles.” The A.I. uses a Rememberer to thwart terrorist attacks before they happen, but one has gone rogue, taunting the A.I. by mutilating the bodies of terrorists that a Rememberer has already killed and leaving behind cryptic messages. The Rogue, however, may be planning something that’s far worse than a potential terrorist strike. The first half of the novel feels muted, consisting mostly of lengthy exposition. But these scenes ultimately prove crucial to the plot, as many delve into weighty concepts such as time-cycles and eternal return—essentially that time is circular and a Rememberer is literally remembering, not necessarily seeing the future. While the first part is restrained, readers will welcome the unleashed latter half, even if it seems to come from nowhere. Characters, for instance, face off against demons, are besieged by demonic possessions, and launch a rescue attempt. Kallie is a fervent protagonist with an intriguing background; she lost her mother to cancer the year before and is estranged from her father. Her relationship with love interest Seth is sufficient if not predictable, but the standout among supporting characters is Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Dennard Bennett. He, like Kallie, has experienced loss—his wife and two daughters died in a plane crash— and watching his progress from investigating a simple murder case to an all-out demon war is, in many ways, more riveting than Kallie’s gradual revelation.
A leisurely opening is mere preparation for the fierce struggle to follow—and it’s more than worth the wait.Pub Date: April 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692356760
Page Count: -
Publisher: Ink-Stone Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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