A splendid revisitation of folklore that takes us to and from familiar cultural touchstones into realms to make Freud...
A delightful, mystical, mythical confection by zeitgeist whisperer Maguire (After Alice, 2015, etc.), who likes nothing more than to work at the dark edges of a fairy tale.
As evidenced especially in Wicked and its sequels, Maguire has a sharp appreciation for what struck Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm way back when: especially if they’re German, the stories we tell our children are marvels of mayhem, compressed slices of violence and bleakness gussied up with an occasional shiny poisoned apple. In them, death is always present. So it is with this latest foray, in which Maguire locates a perhaps unwilling hero in a young foundling, Dirk Drosselmeier, who, having courted death himself, proves to be inept enough with an ax at his adopted woodcutter father’s house to be packed off into the world—narrowly avoiding death, it seems, at the hands of the old man and his wicked-witchish wife. “He’s witnessed enough to be scared already, I can’t make it worse,” she cackles, and off he goes. But the world has plenty of terrors of its own to offer, including the fact that everyone he loves will die or otherwise leave him. He learns to live on his own wits and resources; “I’m more like a spider,” he says, “I cling with strings and hooks only to every passing day.” Improbably, in the face of all that sorrow and odd encounters with the likes of the quack Doctor Mesmer, he makes good; he wasn’t so handy with a hatchet, but with smaller blades he carves out a formidable nutcracker that evolves, in his hands, “from it to he.” Shades of Pinocchio! It’s at this juncture that, as if a mist lifting, the darkness of the story brightens and, magically, the familiar story that we know from Tchaikovsky’s Christmas classic, Klara and the King of Mice and all, resolves with brilliant clarity. It’s a fine bit of sorcery on Maguire’s part, but of course, as all things must, it ends darkly.
A splendid revisitation of folklore that takes us to and from familiar cultural touchstones into realms to make Freud blanch. Wonderful.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-268438-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
PROFILES
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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