A truly fantastic tale of a heartbreaking saint.
Pitiably misshapen, a mind-reading midget struggles toward transcendent beauty in this lacerating yet lyrical fable set in the bordellos, monasteries and asylums of 19th-century Europe.
In the first English translation of his eight books, Swedish author Vallgren works wonders. Psychic cousin to the Elephant Man, Hercules is born under the darkest of stars; in Immanuel Kant’s hometown of Königsberg, he’s hatched as an affront to every sunny dream of the Age of Reason, nightmare child of a prostitute who dies delivering him— stunted, mute, earless, practically armless, his back “covered with black hair as thick as a goat’s.” Down the hall in the love shack known as Your House of Desires, the Beauty to his Beast arrives simultaneously, sweet Henriette, his soulmate. He penetrates with oracular empathy Henriette’s heart and that of any kind soul: Hercules not only senses their deepest desires, but silently empowers them to act on them. Denounced by the townsfolk, however, as the Devil’s offspring, he’s booted from Königsberg after psychically solving a whore’s murder, much to the burg’s embarrassment. After languishing in an asylum, he’s rescued by a monk who fosters the deaf wunderkind’s freakish talent: Hercules soars at the organ, playing with his toes. From his sanctuary, then, he’s wrenched, as peasants storm the gates to eject the “monster.” His picaresque quest unfolds, harrowing adventure after adventure, all in service of his heart’s longing for Henriette. From Rome to Copenhagen to Martha’s Vineyard, where he dies at 101, Hercules ventures, all the while conjuring in those around him inner disturbances that change their lives. Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin and Jerzy Kosinski’s Chauncy Gardener are Hercules’s literary forebears; he joins them as an unforgettable hero, an unsettling miracle-worker whose path to love is filled with incredible pain.
A truly fantastic tale of a heartbreaking saint.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-084199-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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