A chilling ghost story that sets the innocence of childhood against the horrors of domestic abuse.
A young girl with an eerie doll, a ghost hunter with a tragic past, and a mother-daughter team of psychics cross paths in this debut horror novel.
As World War II approaches, 7-year-old Affinity Bell lives an isolated life in a Virginia mansion with her father, Taylor, a wealthy weapons manufacturer with “a knack for all things business, and for all things underhanded and treacherous,” and her beautiful but ineffectual mother Monica. An obsessive woodworker, Taylor is determined to turn his own wife into “a honed and polished dowel” by beating her unmercifully, and Affinity seems to retreat into a fantasy world with Mr. Moppet, a doll with strange powers that alternately hurts and protects her—although it ultimately can’t prevent horror from engulfing her life. Three decades later, in 1974, Tanner Dann, a young Californian writing a book about ghosts, arrives in Virginia, seeking to uncover the secrets of Bell House. He enlists the aid of Linda Cookmeyer, an attractive older psychic, with whom he has a romantic spark. Along with Linda’s even more sensitive daughter, Claire, the trio finds that there’s much more evil in Bell House than a simple haunting, and that each of them will be called upon to face their greatest fears and vulnerabilities. Wilson does a skillful job of weaving the complex fabric of his story, setting a captivating tone from the beginning with Affinity’s unnerving blend of innocence and calculation. The leap forward in time to the 1970s is equally well-managed, and the relationship between the pragmatic Linda and the quixotic Tanner provides a degree of grounding to the fantastic narrative. Readers might wish that this aspect of the story were a little better developed, as things falter a bit with the introduction of archetypal supernatural elements. However, Wilson manages to keep the suspense taut to the end, and all the disparate plot threads come together nicely.
A chilling ghost story that sets the innocence of childhood against the horrors of domestic abuse.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942981-95-4
Page Count: 292
Publisher: W & B Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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