A novel brimming with ideas, ambition, imagination, and possibility yet one in which the characters remain richly engaging...
A Mobius strip of a novel in which time is more a loop than a path and various possibilities seem to exist simultaneously.
Science fiction provides a literary launching pad for this audacious sophomore novel by Palmer (The Dream of Perpetual Motion, 2010). It offers some of the same pleasures as one of those state-of-the-union (domestic and national) epics by Jonathan Franzen, yet its speculative nature becomes increasingly apparent as the novel progresses (while its characters apparently don’t). From the first page, protagonist Rebecca Wright, who works at a computer dating service, feels a "weird, persistent unease"; she thinks the world around her suffers from “a certain subtle wrongness.” Her physicist husband, Philip Steiner, heads a team that's working on what others would call a time machine, though the scientists avoid that label; they don't think their project will create a true time machine, but their research (and even their mistakes) might provide useful discoveries along the way. Rebecca and Philip's son, Sean, who's in second grade, has been an artistic prodigy since preschool, according to his mother, but his father doesn’t understand him at all. As Palmer’s narrative offers sleight-of-hand revelations with absolute command, it becomes apparent that the time they are living in, which often seems to be a comment on the present, is in fact the near future, one in which automobiles drive themselves and the president is capable of appearing on anyone’s home TV to address them personally. It's also increasingly obvious that Rebecca is an alcoholic, in deep denial. The plot pivots on a climactic car crash, a malfunction of the automatic automobile, after Sean has been unfairly disciplined with a detention at school, Rebecca is too inebriated to leave the house, and Philip is too busy at work to intercede, leaving the question of who is behind the wheel and who survives subject to revision. The novel circles back to this pivotal incident time and again; as this plot writes and then overwrites itself, each member of the nuclear family might possibly die, yet all remain crucial to the denouement. Muses Philip, “Ulysses is not a story, so much as a system of the world. A place for everything, and everything in its place.”
A novel brimming with ideas, ambition, imagination, and possibility yet one in which the characters remain richly engaging for the reader.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-90759-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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