A quick, satisfying read with a beautiful otherworldly feel; highly recommended for fans of John Steinbeck.
A novel delivers a rural fable, the story of a man trapped by his own choices.
Fast Eddie Burke always makes his life harder by trying to take the path of least resistance. He works at the coal mine, like almost every man he knows. His wife has left him, and he hints it’s because he didn’t stand up and fight to keep her. He drinks with his buddies in an abandoned house on Fridays. Everyone brings his own liquor. Most of Eddie’s meals are sandwiches from the store or fried squirrel or rabbit he hunts near his house. Just about everything makes him uncomfortable: going to church; hanging around a group of people. So when his co-worker Turp Lawson asks to join the drinking party, Eddie doesn’t know what to make of it. He decides to ask the other guys, and when they agree, Eddie starts down a road that will change his life. Turp seems to be taken with the idea of finally having friends. When Eddie shows the slightest bit of courtesy, Turp asks him over to the house for Sunday dinner. Turp’s wife, Marta, is immediately taken with Eddie and initiates an affair behind her husband’s back. Marta has a habit of belittling Turp, who has never had much confidence. And when Turp brings some questionable moonshine to the drinking bash, he goes off the rails, which only brings Marta and Eddie that much closer. In this short, enjoyable tale, Helvey (Claw Hammer: A Gathering of Stories, 2015, etc.) has a simple but cutting way with his prose. When Eddie happens upon an old man singing, the author has this to say about how the song affects the protagonist: “Even the words sounded strange and tired as though they were very old and had traveled a long way.” In addition, Helvey’s remarkable rural setting and resonant characters are eerily unstuck from time. There are coal mines and family-owned local shops, and the owner of the mine, Eller Whitman, comes off as a dandy millionaire from decades back. But the titular snapshot is a Polaroid, and the cars seem modern.
A quick, satisfying read with a beautiful otherworldly feel; highly recommended for fans of John Steinbeck.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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