An intriguing, if occasionally obtuse, mixture of the historical and the supernatural.
A debut novel about a group of mysterious, night-dwelling creatures and their travels through history.
“Although there is of course no acknowledgment of their existence in our world, I can most emphatically attest to their presence.” So begins this story of the dark creatures known as Night-Travelers—or so they’re called by W. Arthur Richardson, a 1930s writer. He finds himself transfixed by a man named Jean Sylvan, who has good manners, stays in excellent hotels, and isn’t fond of the daytime. Richardson sees him take a young, timid coat-check girl into his company one night, and when he sees her again the next evening, transformed into a woman of the world, he knows something’s up, but he’s not sure exactly what. The girl mysteriously disappears shortly afterward, which, in that era, might have been chalked up as a replaceable loss of the lower orders—were it not for her concerned husband, Jack, who teams up with Richardson in his investigation. So begins a saga that eventually stretches all the way back to 1351 Scandinavia. It also extends forward to 1970s Vermont, where a graduate student named Fran picks up an unassuming hitchhiker wearing a dirty, calico skirt. When strange memories start flooding Fran’s mind, she’s swept up in a whirlwind of activity that eventually involves an aged, though still fiery, Jack. This ambitious novel has a complex scenario and an epic scale. Although the astute reader will surmise that Night-Travelers (or “Nåttfolk,” as they’re also called) are essentially vampires, the book manages to avoid many clichés of the horror genre. The tale is filled with ideas about memory and history, and fantastic and suspenseful scenes, as when a mysterious woman named Pamela Baldwin seeks shelter (“The Sun would be coming soon, and seized with panic, Pamela found herself on the porch of Jack’s farmhouse”). That said, the book can be muddled at times, due to its complexity and shifting cast of characters, and some portions prove difficult to follow. Some readers may get lost in shuffles of time, space and memory, as author Saknusseneouw attempts to distance the Nåttfolk from their more familiar literary cousins.
An intriguing, if occasionally obtuse, mixture of the historical and the supernatural.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Musketaquid House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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