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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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