A smart, entertaining take on eternal conundrums.
Celestial gumshoes search for the source of evil in this knotty supernatural allegory.
Recently deceased ex–CIA agent Stewart Willoughby is an Observer, an almost-angel who uses rough tactics in the fight against demonic adversaries. He gets a break when he recruits a new informant, a senior executive at the Company—aka hell—who’s willing to give him information on “The Formula” that demons use to goad humans into sin. (The impish fiends are forever whispering malevolent hints into people’s ears, sometimes in person and sometimes over the phone from infernal call centers.) With his fetching partner and former fiancée, Layla, Stewart embarks on an extended investigation into the nature and causes of evil, from garden-variety manslaughters to horrific genocides. Their sleuthing takes them to some of history’s grisliest crime scenes—and eventually starts to eat away at their souls, as they resort to methods that are uncomfortably similar to the brutalities they want to eradicate. In this installment of his Logic of Demons series, Goodman continues fleshing out his inventive vision of the afterlife as an edgy, inglorious, down-to-earth place, where heaven itself is divided between hostile liberal and fundamentalist factions, and no one is sure that an always-absent God even exists. The devils, as usual, get the best lines; Goodman’s portrait of hell as a dreary corporate bureaucracy is a satiric gem—the chief torments are pointless routine, office gossip and nasty performance evaluations. The novel drags, though, when it focuses on Stewart and Layla’s relationship, which stays blissfully bland even after it takes a satanic turn. But Goodman also probes meaty philosophical themes with sophistication, as his characters wrestle with the problem of evil and the blurry line separating right from wrong. Subversively, he suggests that evil may not be a demonic plot but just another name for human nature. Goodman’s allegorical symbology isn’t too intricate—a farm boy Stewart encounters turns out to be the quite literal embodiment of Time and Chance—and at times the novel’s intellectual debates feel like an undergraduate seminar. Still, Goodman’s cross between a detective novel and The Screwtape Letters makes for a stimulating read.
A smart, entertaining take on eternal conundrums.Pub Date: May 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1432790790
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A bold, exhausting but highly rewarding experiment in stripping away the illusory world in search of only the most essential...
A carefully structured collection of abstract and conceptual poetry concerned with the nature of reality and relationships.
Raben’s first book-length offering may better be termed a project than a collection, and an ambitious one at that. Composed of 10 thematically distinct chapters, the volume offers a complex, nonlinear structure in which tightly entwined images, phrases and themes from each of the seemingly self-contained chapters shoot out tendrils that loop and coil themselves around the stalks of neighboring chapters. Insistently recursive and nonnarrative, the poems, taken together, read not unlike an untended villanelle gone to seed. There may not be a story, but there’s rhythm and a message. Amid it all, Raben’s voice is eminently postmodern; in addition to recursion and fragmentation, she employs highly irregular, subtle rhyme and meter, while working with short but richly syllable-dense lines. Her characters and perspectives shift frequently, exploring the same question from first-, second- and third-person, sometimes in a matter of a few lines. Time, her narrators understand, is relative—“for a moment we were the same / as we had always been / then the hours became shorter / and the second loses time”—but so too are constructed identities: “I allowed my eyes / to be painted on / chiseled and chipped / it’s harder to undo a life / made from stone.” In her most direct philosophical statements, Raben strikes a Whitmanesque chord: “We are the paint that / makes the painting / not the mind / and not the hand / we are the very stuff of life / together on the sand.” While sharing some philosophical ground with Whitman (though Raben ultimately evinces more pessimism), she evokes Alice Fulton in her abstractions and, at times, calls to mind Charles Simic’s surrealism. Occasionally, the abstractness crosses over into abstruseness, and despite the many elements of its larger structure, the collection feels incomplete. Still, Raben has a solidly crafted, enjoyable and appropriately challenging debut.
A bold, exhausting but highly rewarding experiment in stripping away the illusory world in search of only the most essential qualities of the human experience.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456851538
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An impressive novel about the subtle prejudice and blatant bigotry faced by black men and women in this country.
In Malone’s novel, an Ivy-League educated black man struggles to overcome racism in 1980s Washington, D.C.
Raised to be oblivious to race by his parents, Brandon Northcross truly believed racism was an issue of the past, defeated by the civil rights movement in the 1960s. As one of the only black students in his Dartmouth MBA program, he remains purposefully ignorant of any racism directed at him, assuming job rejections after face-to-face interviews are the result of his own deficiencies rather than thinly veiled discrimination practiced by recruiters. He is elated to land a job beneath his ability at a company with so-called progressive hiring practices. He shines in his new position and his career begins to take off despite the insinuations from his colleagues that he was only hired to fill affirmative-action quotas. Unfortunately, a hateful plan is hatched to get him fired which he, frustratingly, is too traumatized to fight. So begins Brandon’s journey to understand racism and where he fits as a black man in the business world. Though he viscerally experiences depression and hopelessness, Brandon is an inspirational character. He always manages to reeducate and rebuild himself, becoming a proud community leader. From the shut-in elderly man who collects African artifacts to the jazz musicians who introduce Brandon to Miles Davis, Malone uses secondary characters in Brandon’s journey to indirectly educate readers on black history. Some of these ancillary characters come across as very natural additions to Brandon’s life, while others feel slightly forced. The pace is at times hampered by superfluous and contrived dialogue. However, the haunting conclusion more than makes up for the plodding sections of the story.
An impressive novel about the subtle prejudice and blatant bigotry faced by black men and women in this country.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 978-0966392609
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Azure Pub
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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