An ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying coming-of-spirituality tale.
A young man grows up to discover a connection to the paranormal in Deur’s debut novel.
As the story begins, 12-year-old Angelo Novakis haunted by thoughts of suicide by gun. Over the course of the novel, he not only confronts his own dark desires, but also bears witness to how such urges play out in others’ lives. As the tale follows Angelo from his youth to adulthood, it becomes a broader investigation of what makes his life meaningful. Early on, he has visions of himself as a knight fighting a shadowy opponent in a forest long ago; these visions soon inspire a long education in the occult. Angelo becomes versed in multiple religions and possible theories to explain his apparently fantastical experiences. The hero becomes a Platonic inquisitor as he challenges ideas that he encounters over the years—eventually writing a memoir of his visions called Somnia Praeterita. The novel’s second half is that very book, which concerns Luka Dragovic, who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries; it turns out that Angelo has been having visions of events in Luka’s life ever since he was a child. Deur experiments with form in this novel, and the notion of a book within a book being the climax of a story is engaging. However, this experiment goes awry, as there are too many threads left untied in both halves of the book for it to feel like a unified whole. Although the opening of the novel teases Angelo’s self-destruction, in the end, he simply vanishes from the novel, with some parts of his story left incomplete and unresolved. Both sections, but especially the first half, suffer from overwriting, with large swaths of expository text where shorter scenes might have offered better illustrations of complex ideas; the book also tends to state its characters’ thoughts and feelings rather than showing them through action. Indeed, some sections simply feel like lists, and the dialogue often consists of wishful monologues and unrealistic diatribes rather than genuine conversation. There are definitely intriguing ideas here, but they’re lost in a sea of ramble.
An ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying coming-of-spirituality tale.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2020
ISBN: 979-8677399909
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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