Excessive, overwrought, and lacking Smoke’s exciting dramatic thrust.
A return to the Dickensian-dystopian world of Smoke (2016).
Let’s welcome, once again, to a smoke-filled stage your three favorite teenage characters from Smoke, Thomas Argyle, Charlie Cooper, and Eleanor Renfrew, along with a vast array of supporting characters, old and new. Vyleta organizes his bulky novel like a play, with five acts, numerous scenes, and an intermission, interspersing memoranda, letters, and diary entries throughout. It's 1909 in England, 10 years after Thomas, Charlie, and Livia Naylor released Smoke, a visible marker of sin and emotion that the authorities wanted to control. They hoped it would bring about a cultural and political revolution. They were wrong. In Saint John, New Brunswick, elderly playwright Balthazar Black, the grandson of a slave, is putting on a Smoke Theatre skit about Charlie and Thomas—“There is not a story more widely told than theirs.” The audience, suddenly realizing who the actors are playing, gasp. Fake smoke fills the room. Black discovers that Eleanor Renfrew is in the audience. She's the niece of Erasmus Renfrew, who taught at Charlie and Thomas' school and is now the imperious Lord Protector. Balthazar, Eleanor, and the troupe of players sail to New York to foil a dastardly plan of Renfrew's. Meanwhile, Mr. Smith, who works for the powerful Company, has his own plans for gaining power. People have fled to the Minetowns, where they’ve set up their own Workers' Council in Ekklesia, a "giant hollow in the ground." Vyleta’s labyrinthine tale adds subplots upon subplots. We meet Mowgli, a South American boy whose body may have been used to unleash the Smoke. Charlie has ventured to the glaciers of the Himalayas, seeking to discover the origins of Smoke. Could it reside in a dull, velvet-black rock? What unique powers do beetles, sweets, and Smoke Poppies possess? Who is this Angel of the North? Can it save them from Smoke? All about, Black Storms and Gales rage.
Excessive, overwrought, and lacking Smoke’s exciting dramatic thrust.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54022-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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