Through a patchwork of influences ranging from hip to hip-hop, gothic to post-apocalyptic, the author struggles to find his...
Playwright Rux’s first novel, a somber mood piece about two people who connect through music that raises them high above past traumas and present mayhem.
Place: Brooklyn. Time: The near future, just after a violent civil conflict that has upended half the Brooklyn Bridge and sent heavily armed teenaged soldiers swarming into the streets. The principals: Racine, a DJ, and Couchette, a dancer and stripper. He spins for her in a makeshift club in a ravaged mansion owned by a dying Puerto Rican holy woman. Racine has just returned from France, where he was visiting a high-school buddy now in the music business; the trip ended badly. He is extraordinarily tight-lipped, but it’s possible to mine some biographical nuggets from the disjointed narrative. Born in 1976, he was raised in Virginia by a drunken Bible-thumping uncle and later in New York by a foster mother, whose neglect led to the loss of his testicles. He had an older brother who died in a fall off a cliff. The only constants in his life were house fires, one of them set by his reprobate uncle. Couchette’s story is relatively straightforward. She’s the daughter of a jazz musician who owned the mansion until he shot himself when Couchette was little. Her mother moved to Bali, remarried, returned to Brooklyn with another child, and died in the local playground, just like that. These background details hardly make Racine or Couchette more fully dimensional. The bottom line, relentlessly underscored, is that they are lost souls for whom music is the only salvation: “War is not unbearable. What is unbearable is the absence of music and dance.” The story climaxes with yet another fire, this one at a new disco under the bridge.
Through a patchwork of influences ranging from hip to hip-hop, gothic to post-apocalyptic, the author struggles to find his own voice and vision but ultimately sinks into incoherence.Pub Date: May 18, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-7400-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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