A mesmerizing thriller within the peculiar cosmos of professional wrestling.
A group of professional wrestlers are kidnapped in West Virginia and struggle desperately to survive in Sangiao-Parga’s thriller.
Eric Johnson is a performer in the Midwest American Wrestling Association; his ludicrously misspelled stage name (even he hates it) is “Jiggolo.” While he earns a certain modest measure of notoriety from his profession—his matches are sometimes televised—he’s hardly a celebrity, and his income is fairly modest as well. He hitches a ride with a group of other wrestlers headed to a match in Richmond, Virginia. On the way, they stop at a greasy spoon for a late-night meal deep in the hinterlands of West Virginia. When a petulant teen fan gropes Julie Sandusky, a female wrestler, the incident turns into a brutal fight with the restaurant’s staff. One wrestler, Burt Knox, is hit in the head with a glass coffee pot with ferocious force, leaving his life imperiled. Lester Goode, a local and a participant in the fight against the wrestlers, is a murderer who has recently been released from prison; he grimly realizes that he cannot afford more trouble, a predicament chillingly portrayed by the author. He explains his plight to his teenage cousin, Mark, the person who molested Julie: “These people have seen us, they know our names, and there ain’t no way around that.” Lester ties up the wrestlers at gun point and brings them to his mobile home deep in the woods, with murder being his obvious intent; he’s a career criminal and no stranger to killing. The league’s premier wrestler, Brick Lamar, a former elite Marine soldier, is dispatched by the wrestling association to find the missing grapplers; meanwhile, Eric and his peers desperately try to figure out a way to escape.
Sangiao-Parga distills, with unflinching and gritty realism, the unglamorous reality of professional wrestlers—in this telling, their private lives are as uninspiring as their sport is fake. Their world is a sad microcosm of the world at large, infected by a retrograde chauvinism against women and a closed-minded bias against homosexuality. In one tender scene, artfully captured by the author, Ricky Chalmers, one of the wrestlers, comforts Burt, his secret romantic partner, in a poignant moment that shocks Eric. The author is at his best fleshing out his impressively complex characters—even Lester is much more than a violent goon; he is devoted to his cousin, Mark, and he hopes to rescue him from a life that is all but doomed by fate. This paradoxical mix of nihilistic brutality and familial compassion is made plausible by the author. He also furnishes a remarkable justification for why these wrestlers continue to perform with no prospect of advancement: “The truth was, even if the money was mostly shit and they had no hopes of climbing any higher, none of them could really give up that feeling you got when you had the crowd going for you.” This is a gripping novel, intelligent and moving.
A mesmerizing thriller within the peculiar cosmos of professional wrestling.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781954907904
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Woodhall Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.
An author is targeted by a fan who just can’t let her go.
Arden Bowie has had plenty of tragedy in her life, but now she’s finally on top. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she moved from Brooklyn to Ohio to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. She soon became part of their loving family and grew up to become a writer and bookseller. When her debut novel is published, she meets Dustin Dubecki at her first event. He showers her with praise, asks for writing advice, and wants to take her out for coffee. Arden tells herself he’s just a little awkward, but then he keeps showing up at her local events—and, even stranger, she’s sure she sees him lurking at her event in New York City. When he bursts into her apartment one night and assaults her, Arden’s calm life is shattered. Dustin gets a five-year sentence at a psychiatric facility; Arden spends most of that time rebuilding her sense of stability. Eventually, she moves to Oregon to start a new life where Dustin can never find her. But even though she has a beautiful home, a thriving career, a doting family, new friends, and even a potential love interest in a former cop named Gideon Riley, Arden can’t escape Dustin’s rage when his sentence is finally up. Roberts toggles between Arden’s point of view and Dustin’s, giving the reader occasional glimpses into his extremely twisted mindset. Although Arden’s attempts to escape Dustin are engrossing, the story stalls in the middle when far too many pages are dedicated to Arden purchasing and decorating a house. But the excitement picks back up when Dustin, a truly odious villain, re-enters the story. It’s also satisfying to see Arden grow into someone who refuses to be a victim, even as she deals with horrifying circumstances.
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781250413581
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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
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