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 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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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