A dark but exhilarating tale of black magic and religious fanatics.
In this supernatural sequel, a faith healer and his son become targets of a dangerous, misguided man searching for redemption.
As part of a satanic cult’s prophecy, a man named Lucas attempted to kill death-metal guitarist Alec Lowell. But Alec survived and became a popular evangelical faith healer. Lucas escaped arrest and lived on the streets until finding surprising solace at a Christian commune somewhere in the Southwestern United States. Now he believes that to prove his “spiritual worth,” he’ll have to save someone. He tracks down and kidnaps Alec’s son, Jake. Lucas is convinced that the boy, as the son of a false prophet, deserves salvation. The Rev. Jonas Adonis, the commune’s leader, is initially upset by the abduction but eventually accepts that God has led Jake to him. It’s not exactly a tranquil place; many at the commune carry guns, apparently in preparation for an apocalypse. Even their leader is far from amicable, and when Alec comes looking for Jake, Adonis demands he validate his faith healing by performing a miracle. As a few commune members begin distrusting Adonis, they may opt to help the Lowells, and with all those weapons readily available, chaos seems inevitable. Johnson’s novel is relentlessly grim. Characters are generally despicable and won’t earn much reader sympathy, including an individual whom someone kills in a black-magic ritual. But there are standouts in the cast, from Alec’s long-suffering wife, Belinda, who tenaciously searches for her son, to bright 10-year-old Maggie, who separately befriends Lucas and Jake. As in the preceding volume, supernatural components are subtle, like Alec’s ability to heal others. The author sets a brisk momentum by quickly diving into the story, making reading the first book a virtual necessity. A frenzied final act and an unexpected turn deliver a bracing ending that seemingly hints at a third installment.
A dark but exhilarating tale of black magic and religious fanatics. (dedication)Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-09-831446-0
Page Count: 374
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.
Four kids who swore an oath of friendship reunite as adults to face their fears.
The foundation of this novel is a consciously employed trope about messed-up kids, from the Losers Club in Stephen King’s It (1986) to more recent groupings of youth gone wrong in everything from Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids (2017) to Gerard Way’s The Umbrella Academy comic-book series. Here, it’s five kids from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, circa 1998: charismatic Matty, cynical Nick, carefree Hamish, cool-ahead-of-her-time Lore-née-Lauren, and nervous nail-biter Owen. Each burdened with terrible families, they create a pact, the Covenant: “It’s how they’re there for each other. How they’ll do anything for each other. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing.” But when they discover the titular staircase during a camping trip and their impulsive leader Matty disappears while climbing it, the band breaks up. Decades later, Lore is a successful game designer, having abandoned Owen to his anxieties, while Hamish has become a family man and Nick is dying of pancreatic cancer. When he invokes their pact, the surviving members reassemble at a similar anomaly in the woods to make sense of it all. Climbing another staircase into a liminal space marked with signs saying “This place hates you,” among other things, our not-so-merry band suddenly finds themselves trapped in a haunted house. There’s plenty of catnip for horror fans as these former kids work their way through shifting set pieces—rooms where children were tortured, murdered, and worse, including some tailored specifically to them—but the adversary ultimately leaves something to be desired. The book isn’t as overtly gothic as Black River Orchard (2023) or as propulsive as his techno-thrillers, but Wendig has interesting things to say about friendship and childhood trauma and its reverberations. Lore gets it, near the end: “We’re all really fucked up and just trying to get through life, and it’s better when we do it together instead of alone.”
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593156568
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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