Readers who like cow-related puns and vaudeville action will enjoy Granholm’s debut.
A comic disaster novel that marries Sharknado-type shenanigans with a keen sense of the absurd.
On the Pacific island of Wagyu, Dr. Yan Mishima dedicates himself to his greatest invention yet: a miniature nuclear power source known as a Nucliette. But when a freak ocean wave destroys the lab and whisks the Nucliette out to sea, hell follows with it. The destination: Bay City, where “meteorolonomicist” Devon Steerman, an expert in the study of how weather affects the economy; Tauros car salesman Belmont “Red” Simford; Simford’s henchman Dutch Friesian; celebrity impersonator Siri Batangas; a group of thrill-seeking surfers; and beat cop Chris Holstein reckon with the Nucliette’s awesome side effects. These include the creation of telepathic, fire-breathing cows with acid-spewing udders and explosive cow pies; mutant sea gulls; and comic chaos that will bring the world to the brink of annihilation. Meanwhile, aliens bearing an uncanny resemblance to Hereford cows plan to colonize Earth. Even those with little taste for bovine puns (of which there are plenty) will find themselves submitting to the sheer exuberance of Granholm’s vision. The plot hits all the typical nuclear-age B-movie beats as well as underlying environmentalist rage, liberally spiced with the author’s obvious knowledge of disaster scenarios. The story never quite reaches the dizzying literary heights of Kurt Vonnegut’s or Thomas Pynchon’s works, although Granholm clearly tips his hat to them with his ridiculous character names. However, the novel shares Stephen King’s books’ well-observed sense of place and pace, and even its pulpier prose resonates with the emphatic confidence of a writer who’s unafraid to double down on absurdity. Although the humor sometimes undermines the dramatic action and detracts from the careful worldbuilding, there’s no doubt that Granholm is technically skillful—as adept with comic characterization and juggling multiple viewpoints as he is with emphatically terrible jokes.
Readers who like cow-related puns and vaudeville action will enjoy Granholm’s debut.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9989631-0-5
Page Count: 212
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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