by Glenn A. Segal ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 27, 2012
An engaging, insightful satire on the place of revelation in the modern world.
The story of an unlikely modern-day messiah.
Segal’s fiction debut begins unassumingly enough: In 2004, on a snowy patch of road on the way to Philadelphia, auto mechanic Bob Griffin and his girlfriend, Lisa, are surprised to find themselves caught up in a celestial vision. A grizzled middle-aged man (like “Anthony Hopkins on a bender”) appears and informs them that his earthly name is Mathew Wells, the Messenger, and that they have been chosen to receive his instructions. Bob and Lisa, as well as their extended circle of friends and family, are understandably nonplussed, and as Segal rather insightfully shows, their skepticism is only slightly allayedby miracles the Messenger performs once he’s a guest in the modest Griffin home. He breaks the ice by showing them all the ghost of Bob’s dead wife, he miraculously removes an old piece of Vietnam shrapnel from Bob’s father, he levitates a basketball—yet from the beginning, Mathew is clear that these parlor tricks are only to establish his bona fides; his true goals are much grander. “My purpose is nothing short of saving the planet,” he tells his small group of first contacts. And this will be accomplished by the church they’ll establish, called the Sphere, which will teach the ways of “Spin & Modulation”—a means to connect with the flow of the universe—to the people of the world. To help spread this doctrine, Mathew asks for trust, “not your immortal soul.” They anticipate conflicts with the world’s religions, all of which Segal portrays with thorough cynicism—“The Catholic Church won’t be thrilled…not because of lost souls, but because of lost revenues”—and the bulk of the novel is concerned with the practical steps of setting up a messianic ministry in the 21st century. (One of the disciples is in charge of creating the website.) And although the divine messenger is rather overimpressed by the music of the Grateful Dead—“Matt remained in awe at the clarity attained in a shifting modulation sequence”—Segal’s crisp, lively writing style carries the story effortlessly to its bittersweet end.
An engaging, insightful satire on the place of revelation in the modern world.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
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National Book Award Finalist
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
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