Simpleminded, heavy-going nostalgia for the Sixties-rock counterculture—gotten up as lurid melodrama, with a murky mixture of psycho-whodunit, conspiracy-thriller, and (in the feverish, limp final chapters) vague occultery. Novelist Sandy Blair, who was a counterculture journalist back in the 1960s, agrees to investigate a murder for his old, now-commercialized underground paper Hedgehog: Jamie Lynch, slimy bygone rock-promoter, has been killed up in Maine, his heart cut out! Could this be connected to Lynch's old band "the Nazgul," a favorite of Sandy's? Yes indeed. The body's found on a bloody Nazgul poster—and on the anniversary of the Nazgul's final West Mesa concert in 1971. . . when lead singer Pat Hobbins was killed by a sniper, leading to crowd-panic fatalities. So Sandy tracks down the three surviving Nazgul band-members: a contented New Jersey bar-owner (whose beloved bar then burns down mysteriously); a pathetic has-been, playing lousy music in Chicago; a Santa Fe family man, still aching for a comeback. He also visits a few of his Sixties chums—with sex, laments over America's loss of '60s values, anger over assorted sell-outs, and several shrill, overdone encounters. (An old draft-dodger pal is being kept virtual prisoner by his rightwing father.) But Sandy eventually realizes that the villain behind the killing is rich, renegade radical-terrorist Edan Morse, who is planning a reunion/tour of the Nazgul—complete with a living replica of the dead Pat Hobbins and apocalyptic, crowd-riot material: "We will seize the bloodtide, and in its wake we will have a new world." Seduced by Morse's lethal sidekick "Ananda," ambivalent Sandy becomes PR man for the comeback tour—slowly realizing that some demonic force is at work. (The kid impersonating Hobbins is possessed during performance.) And, when history threatens to repeat itself at West Mesa, it's Sandy who resists the demon, destructive force. . . clearing the way for a dubious happy ending all around. Unfortunately, hero Sandy is too self-righteous and relentlessly adolescent to take seriously—so his long, talky socio-cultural thrashings fall flat (despite some amusing wiseguy dialogue). And Martin, who managed to create subtle chills in Fevre Dream (1982), falls to make any aspect of the suspense here—the conspiracy, the demonics, the concerts—convincing or scary. The result, then, is a busy, ambitious hybrid—too shallow to engage thoughtful Sixties veterans, too pretentious to please thrill-seekers, but energetic and flashy enough to keep a fair-sized audience reading.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1983
ISBN: 0553383078
Page Count: 379
Publisher: Poseidon/Pocket Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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