A caustic, unexpected comic horror story in which the villain, as always, thinks he’s the hero.
A wannabe writer who’s a real jerk writes a bestseller in an eerie fashion.
There’s been a wealth of spooky comic-horror novels in recent years, and this wonderfully bizarre entry from multimedia scribe and Emmy Award–winning Veep writer Quantick (Go West, 2019, etc.) definitely fits the bill. Set in 1979 in a small town in rural Illinois, the book concerns one Todd Milstead, an aspiring writer who is introduced in the first line as “an asshole” and is later described by one of the handful of people who actually like him as a “pompous, vain, arrogant, self-obsessed, rude bastard.” He drinks too much, cheats on his wife, lectures his friends, and generally behaves as described. While the character himself is deeply unpleasant, it’s worth reading to the end of Quantick’s deceptive puzzle-box of a novel. The biggest change in Todd’s life comes when he uses his eidetic memory to copy word for word a now-obscure 1966 bestselling novel called All My Colors by a writer named Jake Turner. To Todd’s surprise, his copy of the novel, which he's published under his own name, becomes a runaway hit. The middle sags a bit with a painfully accurate portrayal of a book tour, but Quantick gives away just enough strangeness amid Todd's perpetual breakdown to keep the reader going. Following a divorce, Todd hires a seedy private eye to follow his ex-wife and her new lover, who doesn’t seem to appear in photographs. Two of his friends die under mysterious circumstances, and Todd himself is stalked by an enigmatic biker, not to mention the weight of his own guilt over his massive duplicity and the certainty that he’s sure to get caught. As a satire of the writing life, it’s less effective, but as a twisty and fitfully funny episode of The Twilight Zone, it’s a blast.
A caustic, unexpected comic horror story in which the villain, as always, thinks he’s the hero.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78565-857-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Titan Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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