A sharply written and delightfully unnerving tale.
In Ayers’ debut horror novel, six strangers on a spiritual journey turn on one another while facing a terrifying menace in the woods.
A handful of people meet in Pennsylvania to go on a trip organized by a company called Mystic Tours. The clients include brokerage CEO Ken Berman and personal trainer Gabriella “Gaby” Moreno as well as Beverly Sutton, Coop, Lamar, and the decidedly unsociable Wade. John Lightfoot, a Shawnee member of the Chalakatha tribe, is the group’s guide on what’s billed as a weeklong “quest for a new you.” He drives them all to a remote campsite in the wilderness, and that evening, each experiences a vision during a purification ceremony in the sweat-lodge wigwam that also acts as their sleeping quarters. By morning, however, John has mysteriously vanished, along with his van. Everyone is understandably shaken by this turn of events, and Wade exacerbates their unease with his solo hunting excursions and violent tendencies. But nighttime proves to be even worse, as a strange, ominous black mass stalks the forest, and only light appears to keep it at bay. The group struggles to find a way out of the woods and a method of communicating with the outside world. But it isn’t long before they descend into a vicious spiral of deception, accusations, and betrayal. Ayers’ characters are a motley bunch who each have very different motivations; Coop, for example, is initially excited to go on what will be his second spiritual retreat, and Ken is solely interested in the survival training’s physical components. Everyone harbors secrets, as well, which range from the tragic to the appalling. These all gradually come to light, which keeps the pace brisk and opens up numerous plot possibilities. Although Wade is unsettling from the beginning, other group members also prove to be volatile or have unexpectedly shady pasts. The black mass, meanwhile, is a persistent threat that Ayers describes in proficient, dreamlike passages: “the fog-like haze of steam rising from the endless swirls of ash decorating the landscape.” Many readers will likely be able to predict the ending, but an earlier plot twist is genuinely surprising.
A sharply written and delightfully unnerving tale.Pub Date: July 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-909058-1
Page Count: 565
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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