Heightened storytelling and characterization uplift a familiar spies-chase-superpowered-kid premise.
In this debut novel, a boy finds an ancient medallion that elevates his scientific knowledge to superhuman level—which makes him a quarry for ruthless American government agents.
In Shanahan’s SF thriller, the title character is a 10-year-old Virginia schoolboy who finds a miraculous artifact—actually an ancient Navajo medallion called the “Nílch’I”—in a stream bed. A prologue has informed readers that the object was stolen from the United States government at the end of World War II by a Rita Hayworth–lookalike, secretary Eleanor Cole, who was brutally gunned down during an escape attempt. But in 2020, the recovered artifact amps up Hollis Whittaker’s knowledge of math and science considerably—astronomically, in fact. When Hollis remaps the whole solar system and proves the long-theorized existence of a 10th planet beyond Pluto, the fifth grader becomes famous overnight, though all the slightly overweight boy can say about the matter is that it’s “cool.” When an antiques dealer posts an image of the medallion online for enthusiasts, she is summarily murdered. Hollis soon becomes the object of a nationwide hunt, along with his more outgoing best friend, Kirby Cooper-Quinn, and their mysterious but rather maladroit savior, a young Native American woman from New Mexico out of her element. Action periodically returns to the 1945 backstory of Eleanor and her #MeToo–type dealings with sleazy military brass (World War II Americans don’t exactly earn their “Greatest Generation” stripes here). Shanahan’s prose is on target throughout, carrying the pursuit-driven story forward as smooth as a bullet’s trajectory, although the mystique of the book’s MacGuffin medallion gets traded in for an explanation that is one of SF’s hoariest clichés. The denouement depends on a revelation of hitherto unknown superpowers that may signal a sequel. The voices of the young characters are especially convincing, with a nice touch that even with his augmented IQ, Hollis remains a firmly ordinary, unprepossessing boy whose reaction to most everything is pretty much “cool.” Even with the violence and swearing, this tale would still rate as YA material (pretty cool stuff, at that), albeit for a precociously cynical adolescent readership with no trust in government authorities except as killers.
Heightened storytelling and characterization uplift a familiar spies-chase-superpowered-kid premise. (author bio)Pub Date: June 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64599-046-8
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Encircle Publications, LLC
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fever dream about despair and regret that will stay with you long after the credits have rolled.
When an unreleased cult movie is rebooted, the surviving member of the original film’s crew grapples with psychic whiplash.
Even though it’s not steeped in horror lore like the bangers being cranked out by Stephen Graham Jones or Grady Hendrix, this captivating take is tailor-made for fans of Stephen King and Jordan Peele alike. A cautionary tale with elements of indie movie darlings The Blair Witch Project, Blue Velvet, and River’s Edge, this chronicle of hometown kids trying to make a cheap slasher flick is shockingly memorable and deeply disturbing. Our unnamed narrator is the last survivor of the eponymous movie, filmed in the summer of 1993. Their Horror Movie concerns teens who torture one of their own—the narrator’s role is that of the Thin Kid, akin to the Slender Man of urban legend—and suffer the consequences. In the mix are the film’s obsessive director, Valentina; a handful of cast and crew; and the film’s ethereal screenwriter, Cleo, whose presence is most fully felt within the pages of her unusually personal screenplay. After a bewildering tragedy, the film was never released. Decades later, Valentina uploads a few scenes, some stills, and the screenplay to the internet, inspiring the modern-day reinvention. With his crewmates long dead by mostly natural causes, the narrator reluctantly agrees to capitalize on his infamy, eventually agreeing to participate in a hot horror reboot. Revolving between the original production and the big-budget reimagining, Tremblay deftly sidesteps genre tropes and easy laughs for a truly disturbing experience inside some very troubled heads. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s going to be a great movie,” cautions our Thin Kid. “You’re all going to see it. Most of you are really going to like it.…Will the movie be something you take with you, that stays with you, burrows into and lives in a corner inside you? That, I don’t know.”
A fever dream about despair and regret that will stay with you long after the credits have rolled.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780063070011
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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