Llanillo’s bilingual short stories explore the spiritual, macabre, and mundane.
A young woman’s luxurious handkerchief slowly sucks the life out of her; a skeptical man meets his guardian angel that only he can see; an innocuous email from a friend drives a woman to the brink of insanity. These stories and more can be found in this collection by Llanillo, renowned in Latin America for her literary musings on faith, anguish, and death. Most have appeared in her previous anthologies, but this is the first published posthumously and the widest in scope. Each tale is told in English and Spanish, with translations by Martínez and Cooper that offer slightly different tones; Spanish readers will find the stories conveyed with more humor than the English versions. Many entries are quite short, and some would qualify as flash fiction. Llanillo’s spare, measured prose conveys emotion in few words: “Each evening she became a bit more the very axis of his existence. He knew that at ten o’clock, ringing like a flock of doves, the telephone would take over his evening.” With vague, even sinister titles like “Vengeance,” “The Cane,” and “On the Train,” her writing often ruminates on flawed social structures; personal weakness, like machismo or vanity; and unfulfilled desire. While it can be assumed all tales are set in Cuba, where Llanillo was born and died, many make scant mention of place and time. There are ample cliffhangers, last-minute twists to disarm the reader, and multiple bleak endings; some plotlines grow repetitive. Readers looking for deeply shaded characters and complex plots may be underwhelmed; this work is best suited for those who appreciate dark, unadorned metaphorical fiction.
An intriguing, chilling collection that demands introspection from its readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-944176-10-5
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Cubanabooks
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: SHORT STORIES | SUSPENSE | PARANORMAL FANTASY
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
79
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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK TO SCREEN
The Wyoming winter brings maverick game warden Joe Pickett poachers, murderers, spies, and some ferocious bad weather.
Seeking a wounded elk and a marauding wolf during a brutal snowstorm, Joe is amazed to discover a human corpse sticking halfway out of a metal outbuilding on the Double Diamond ranch. While he’s conscientiously photographing the crime scene, somebody starts shooting at him. Ranch foreman Clay Hutmacher refuses to say anything about the building’s purpose until he checks with billionaire ranch owner Michael Thompson; Gov. Colter Allen abruptly orders Joe off the case; and departing Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Scott Tibbs, the boss who’d do anything to avoid having Joe make waves, reports that there’s no body at the place he described. Meanwhile, Joe’s old friend Nate Romanowski, an outlaw falconer, is approached by ex–Army Ranger Jason Demo, who’s trying to attract anti-government malcontents to join the secessionist Sovereign Nation, and Joe realizes that his predatory mother-in-law, Missy, is neglecting her fifth or sixth husband, attorney Marcus Hand, who’s dying of pancreatic cancer, to cozy up to Allen, who plans to launch his campaign for reelection at the public library headed by Joe’s wife, Marybeth. What does the death of University of Wyoming engineering professor Zhang Wei, if that’s really who the dead man was, have to do with all of this malfeasance? Like a patient spider, Box plays out plotline after plotline, balancing his sympathies adroitly between anti-establishment libertarians who’ve had enough of the coastal elites and officers sworn to serve and protect their communities, before knotting them all together with a climactic revelation that for better or worse will leave you gasping.
One of the most successful of Box’s increasingly ambitious have-it-all thrillers.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780593331309
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Categories: SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION
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