An uncommonly intellectual adventure.
A dense, detailed novel about the mysterious city-state of Grimpkin and an outcast’s bid for fortune and glory.
An especially appealing book for addicts of heroic sword-and-sorcery, this bold submission for the approval of the fantasy readership deftly weaves an epic tale out of a byzantine city, an equally complex plot, compelling characters and a sympathetic heroine from one of many intriguing race-cultures that provide the evocative palette coloring Chestney’s original but respectfully indebted mythos. At the novel’s center is the wonderful set piece of Grimpkin, so lovingly rendered that it functions as a character, and at Grimpkin’s center is the Goblin Knight Inn, a rogues’ gallery of sorcerers, soothsayers, swordsmen and shadows where all the energies, myths and black markets coalesce. Grimpkin is a city just outside of time, but with many vestigial traits that keep it from the brink of total anachronism; nice touches include the denizens living by canonical hours and the magic being partly structured on biblical theology. Grimpkin is most broadly racially divided between humans and those creatures considered “Inhuman.” And at the center of the drama is the outcast heroine Lakif who arrives in the city to find a competent swordsman and perhaps the mysterious Rare Earth Stone, the revelation of which is central to what appears to be a planned series of novels. Magic abounds as Lakif pieces together the clues that will lead her to the stone, and her psychic struggles are rendered in the purplest of prose. Indeed, the real star of the show is often the writing that is carefully crafted and linguistically playful (some characters speak in a laconic plain speech and others in a diction peppered with medievalisms). So strong is the prose’s love affair with the settings and characters it describes that there are a few moments when Chestney could be moving things along instead of pounding away at the romance, but these are admirable faults that readers easily forgive in a fantasy market often dominated by formulaic potboilers that are forgotten almost as soon as the covers are closed. This one lingers on.
An uncommonly intellectual adventure.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0984070701
Page Count: 277
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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