A lovingly designed metafictional sendup of genre novels.
A debut metafictional fantasy tells the story of a private investigator plucked out of his own book.
Joe Slade is the prototypical hard-boiled detective: street-smart, tough, wisecracking, and jaded. He’s attempting to solve his latest case when three strangers—emphasis on strange—step in and solve it for him. They seem to know everything about him, in fact. He agrees to go with them to their hideout to discuss a proposition they have for him. That’s when things get really weird: Time and space begin to warp, and he ends up in an impossibly large library filled with an infinite number of books. Even some volumes about himself. Joe Slade, they tell him, is the main character in a series of detective novels by an author named Ben Westing. These strangers—who turn out to be a wizard, an elf, and a dwarf—are characters in a fantasy novel by an author named Howard Zagny. “You’ve already seen we are able to escape from our own book,” the wizard tells Joe. “With your help, we will escape from all books. We’ll go there. To the world where the books are written. There we will confront our authors and live lives that we will write with our own hands.” What follows is their escapade across genres—romance, sci-fi, horror, and more—to literally meet their makers. Along the way, Joe has the opportunity to defy the tropes he’s been shackled with and find out just what sort of hero he really is. Sharp writes in a mercurial prose that morphs to fit each genre the characters travel through. He finds creative ways to portray these metafictional shifts, as here, when the narration switches from Joe’s first-person perspective to the third person: “Joe could not shake an unnameable strangeness that had settled upon him. His thoughts seemed more distant, less audible within his own mind. It was as though some kind of mental fog had settled upon his consciousness and would not relinquish its grip.” The book is clever, amusing, surprising, and genuinely fun: an old-time adventure that will keep readers on their toes while leaving the door open for any and all possibilities.
A lovingly designed metafictional sendup of genre novels.Pub Date: May 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71953-015-6
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
