A sprawling and inventive dark comedy.
A strange species of beetle throws a venture capitalist’s life into chaos in Brannon’s debut novel.
Herman Glüber is an unethical, athletic, homophobic, cocaine-using, impeccably groomed dealmaker at a Seattle venture capital firm. He has an enviable office in the iconic Smith Tower and a beautiful girlfriend named Margot—though he’s not hugely fond of Margot’s 12-year-old son, Ethan, who has a peculiar interest in insects. Herman has just closed a deal on an asset he’s particularly excited about—an apple orchard on the banks of the Wenatchee River that can be sliced into valuable lots—but when he goes out celebrating with his co-workers, he encounters a a tarot card reader who gives him a dire warning. Madame Laverne Korzha de las Bulgarias tells him that there’s something wrong with the deal, that someone he looks up to will turn into a monster, and that someone will die. Part of Herman’s problem is the appearance in Seattle of an invasive species of beetle that feeds on electricity. He’s not the only one suffering, though, as a whole cast of intersecting lives scrambles to deal with the power outages and unusual happenings that plague Washington state. These include Herman’s colleague, hipster-yuppie Loven Boilee; the representative of the apple orchard’s undocumented workers, Lupita Bevilacqua, who’s spurned Herman’s advances in the past; Jodie Cavendish, a CIA operative on the trail of the dangerous beetle; Saint Stephen Rheese, a marijuana smuggler trying to save his sick niece; and Duncan Klevit, Herman’s boss, who’s also a serial killer. If they can’t get a handle on the situation, the beetles may well turn Washington into a version of their native region of Inner Mongolia: a technological desert known as Deadland.
Brannon’s prose is dry and precise, which lends itself to moments of terror and humor, by turns: “Mass hysteria and panic ensued when the assembly of horror movie fans were forced to evacuate the Cinerama as the bugs shorted out the power….It was already a busy night in Seattle. The Eagles were in town for their final farewell tour…singing ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling.’ ” Despite the messy, disaster-movie premise (and the opening pages of joke blurbs from people with such names as “Opal Winfrey” and “George Slanders”), Brannon generally plays the main plot pretty straight. Some scenes are quite tense, and a gripping sense of dread grows as one goes deeper into the story. Herman starts out as a thoroughly intolerable character, but the emergency offers him opportunities to evolve, Scrooge-like, into something better. If the novel has a flaw, it is its nearly 450-page length, which is achieved less by a proliferation of events than by the fact that nearly every scene is drawn out a bit too much. Even so, the characters and prose style are generally compelling, and the cartoonishly apocalyptic scenario manages to feel relevant and chillingly believable in this age of unlikely plagues. Readers will find much to enjoy here, and they’ll likely look forward to Brannon’s next offering.
A sprawling and inventive dark comedy.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9862101-2-9
Page Count: 466
Publisher: Odysseus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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