An original, entertaining horror fantasy.
Cubist art runs amok and slaughters museum staff in this arty, high-concept supernatural thriller debut.
Georges Bosque, a master of the cubist style of painting, wanted his last works to be destroyed after his death—including a painting depicting two angels of death roaming a World War I battlefield. But Noelle Walker, the acquisitions curator at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, is happy to buy them from his widow, despite their spooky aura. Trouble starts when museum employee Bruce Mallory scans one of the paintings with a new computer-graphics gizmo that projects paintings in three dimensions. It works great with naturalist artworks, but cubist paintings are, well, different, and their projections cause bystanders to mimic their off-kilter geometry—eventually turning them into mangled heaps of flesh. Before you can say “non-Euclidean universe,” the gadgetry has liberated a ghoulish Bosque figure from its canvas to wander the galleries, looking for fresh victims. Noelle, Bruce and Noelle’s elegant boss, Geoffrey, must cope with art that’s gone off the deep end; at the same time, Noelle deals with her romantic feelings for Bruce and for Geoffrey, the father of her child. As the “malicious Cubist thing” passes paintings, they come to life, and threatened humans dive into pictures to escape the lurking danger—causing consternation among the paintings’ inhabitants, whose flatland world has suddenly been invaded. Art teacher Golembiewski creates an intriguing new menace which works its mayhem as artists do, by creatively reimagining space and structure—but with grisly real-world effects. Although the overall conceit is a bit cartoonish, she grounds it in subtle, psychologically realistic prose and a gallery full of sharply etched characters. (The sullen, liberally pierced goth art student who sets off the carnage is a particular hoot.) Although the subject matter may be lurid at times, the author’s fine brushwork keeps the picture sharp.
An original, entertaining horror fantasy.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1458207425
Page Count: 248
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The narrator is researching for his book, The Day the World Ended, when he comes up against his karass, as he later understands it through Bokononism. It leads him to investigate Dr. Hoenniker, "Father of the A-Bomb," whom his son Little Newt says was playing cat's cradle when the bomb dropped (people weren't his specialty). The good doctor left his children an even greater weapon of devastation in ice-nine, an inheritance which won his ugly daughter a handsome husband; little Newt, a Russian midget just his size for an affair that ended when she absconded with a sliver of ice-nine; and made unlikely Franklin the right hand man of Papa Monzano of San Lorenzo, a make-believe Caribbean republic. On the trail of ice-nine, the narrator comes in for Papa's death and is tapped for the Presidency of San Lorenzo. Lured by sex symbol Mona, he accepts, but before he can take office, ice-nine breaks loose, freezing land and sea. Bokonon, the aged existentialist residing in the jungle as counter to the strong man, formulates a religion that makes up for life altogether: since the natives are miserable and there is little hope for changing their lot, he takes advantage of the release of ice-nine to bring them a happy death. The narrator's karass is at last made clear by Bokonon himself, leaving him to commit a final blasphemy against whoever is up there. A riddle on the meaning of meaninglessness or vice versa in a devastation-oriented era, with science-fiction figures on the prowl and political-ologies lanced. Spottily effective.
Pub Date: March 18, 1963
ISBN: 038533348X
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1963
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.
Science fiction author (The Wall of Storms, 2016) and translator (The Redemption of Time, Baoshu, 2019) Liu’s short stories explore the nature of identity, consciousness, and autonomy in hostile and chaotic worlds.
Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia (“Ghost Days”). A poor salvager on a distant planet learns to channel a revolutionary spirit through her alter ego of a rabbit (“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard”). In “Byzantine Empathy,” a passionate hacktivist attempts to upend charitable giving through blockchain and VR technology even as her college roommate, an executive at a major nonprofit, fights to co-opt the process, a struggle which asks the question of whether pure empathy is possible—or even desired—in our complex geopolitical structure. Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity, in which human minds are scanned and uploaded to servers, establishing an immortal existence in virtuality, a concept which many previous SF authors have already explored exhaustively. (Liu also never explains how an Earth that is rapidly becoming depleted of vital resources somehow manages to indefinitely power servers capable of supporting 300 billion digital lives.) However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance in its depiction of a father who stubbornly clings to a flesh-and-blood existence for himself and his loved ones in the rotting remains of human society years after most people have uploaded themselves (“Staying Behind”). There is also some charm in the title tale, a fantasy stand-alone concerning a young woman snatched from her home and trained as a supernaturally powered assassin who retains a stubborn desire to seek her own path in life.
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-03-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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