An eerie homage to the dystopian genre.
Paganacci (Everything Is Always Perfect, 2018) offers a collection of apocalyptic fiction and poetry.
The author fixates on all things dark, disturbing, and morbid in this series of short stories, interspersed with brief, free-verse poems. He begins with “California,” in which a caretaker for an elderly ex-Navy man and a former showgirl must figure out why they’ve seemingly fled their home. A boy and his Jack Russell terrier inadvertently discover an extraterrestrial portal in “Hole in the World” and a retiree hurts his ankle on a hike and resorts to drastic measures to get out of the desert alive in “Water.” Paganacci sprinkles sci-fi concepts throughout these tales, including inventions, such as an implant that can be used to kill oneself in an emergency, and deadly creatures, including an 8-foot, tentacled terror that cocoons its victims. The author also plays with magic, time travel, and the idea of duplicates. Not everything in the future is necessarily bad, however; one society, for instance, has legalized marijuana, banned prescription drugs, eliminated guns, and eradicated war. The character descriptions throughout this collection are sharp; take Donny, a young man who laments that “I’m good at remembering details but I can’t follow instructions, which makes no sense to me.” The narrator of “Hot Shower” struggles with “depersonalization syndrome,” an inability to recognize himself as human. Instead of an arm and a hand, for instance, he describes “an outgrowth with a hinged flap at the end”; instead of eyes, he has “glassy organs that function as visual sensors.” Paganacci’s poems don’t quite jibe with the short stories’ themes, however, and they add little to the book as a whole. Some lines even seem nonsensical: “An apple being murdered by a bullet / Caught red-handed at the speed of surprised light.” Still, the stories are sufficient reason to read this book.
An eerie homage to the dystopian genre.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 85
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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