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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.
A relationship between young screen actors is magical, fraught, and relentlessly public in Green’s first novel for adults.
“Every movie romance needs an Obstacle, a reason the characters don’t naturally fall into each other.” In the off-screen romance between actors Juniper Castillo and Kai Laramie, the obstacle is a moving target. Juniper notices early on that as flirty and forward as Kai is, he seems “closed off to a romantic connection”; that turns out to be the tip of a very problematic iceberg. The two meet in the lobby of a Pittsburgh hotel where they will be spending the evening with Matthew Malone, the megastar playing Andy Warhol in a movie they’re about to begin shooting, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Kai has been cast as Andy’s intern, Juniper as a journalist who gets in over her head. This is Juniper’s first adult role after a long run as a Nickelodeon child star, and newcomer Kai’s first role of any kind. Green evokes in compelling detail all the phases and aspects of the film project, from the table read to the screening of the rough cut, from the social media fanfare to the public premiere and the press junket, moving back and forth between Juniper’s and Kai’s first-person perspectives. In a meeting with one of the ubiquitous publicists, Kai learns that somehow “the high school stuff” he never talks about—despite their growing inseparability and seemingly profound connection, he hasn’t even brought himself to share it with Juniper—has surfaced. Details emerge slowly, then blow up in the media; the book’s third act focuses on the destructive potential of celebrity culture in a climate that makes Warhol’s milieu look innocent by comparison. After a long break from writing fiction—his last two books were Everything Is Tuberculosis (2025) and The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021)—Green fills this novel with carefully observed details of Hollywood culture and characters, including running jokes about vegan cuisine, media training, and the way Kai’s agent constantly and boorishly consults his young female assistant on points of political correctness. Can he talk about “hot girls”? Can he quote T.S. Eliot? OK to say “dog vomit”?
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9780525426073
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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