An oracular, sometimes-poetic, always-lugubrious meditation on the spiritual cesspool that is the universe.
A fictive jeremiad scabrously bewails the utter depravity of urban society and the human soul.
Debut author Hinrichsen unspools the blight, crime, squalor, and anomie of a nameless big city in brief chapters—essentially short stories—that sketch an anonymous character or a tawdry tableau with few narrative threads connecting them. Part I presents profiles of representative citizens: oldsters with fading memories of hollow lives; a callous drug dealer and a wasted male junkie/whore; a gang leader smacking down a rival; three separate killers who slaughter random women; a grizzled cop who understands arbitrary murderers can’t be caught; a priest losing his faith; a crowd mobbing a dance club with a sign reading, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”; and a “happy family” of mom, dad, and baby daughter that stays cheerful in an offhandedly violent fashion. Part II introduces supernatural and macabre elements as various characters, groups, and settings—monkish “watchers”; an immortal consciousness in a creepy house; a crowd of shades trapped in an alley; a charismatic leader commanding arsonists; a captain nicknamed the Mighty Charon delivering a shipload of human cargo—conceive hazy forebodings about the end of the world. Part III follows a mysterious man and woman who wander the city ruminating on its sinfulness, she hoping to find a shred of redemptive human innocence, he feeling certain there is none. The author’s Dantean vision of the city and its inhabitants is rich in lurid imagery of corruption, bloodshed, and doom, but it’s as static as a morality play. A few characters, like a homeless man who offers a grisly sacrifice of atonement, make arresting and significant choices, but most undertake no psychological or ethical journey and simply follow their iniquitous natures to hell. Hinrichsen’s prose is often energetic and evocative, but it gets weighed down by apocalyptic portentousness at every turn. Sample dudgeon: “One day there would be no spirit, no soul….This was the end of days prophesied for thousands of years. The apocalypse was slipping in through a small crack in the window.” (If you’re wondering what bleak vista prompts these musings, it’s children ice-skating.) As the overwrought novel slouches toward its climax, with both God and Satan contemplating suicide, readers may also find themselves praying that the end is nigh.
An oracular, sometimes-poetic, always-lugubrious meditation on the spiritual cesspool that is the universe.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9591-0
Page Count: 212
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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