An endlessly appealing supernatural tale with two charming protagonists.
This fifth installment of a series finds zombies in Iowa, part of a sinister plan that vampire and werewolf agents are investigating.
Samuel Johnson has encountered various creatures as an agent for Vampires Against The Evil. These include werewolves, aliens, and fiendish vamps called the Evil Ones, who consume blood directly from humans. But now Samuel and his fellow agents are tracking zombies ambling through residential areas in Des Moines, killing them at the first indication of “dangerous activity.” The appearances of the undead aren’t random, as Samuel quickly determines that black vans are dropping off the zombies. VATE agents search for the source while the zombies become increasingly harder to kill. Meanwhile, lycanthrope Joe Butler, who’s previously worked with Samuel, is on assignment for the Werewolf Organization Of Fighters. He’s shadowing out-of-town Wild Ones—rogue but not feral werewolves. These Wild Ones are meeting with some Evil Ones, though it’s common knowledge that werewolves and vampires hate one another. Joe gets closer to Henry Borman, one particularly suspicious werewolf, by convincing Henry’s pack to take him in. The agent learns of a mysterious third party involved in the unfolding plot and that VATE and WOOF each have a mole. Soon, Joe’s and Samuel’s paths intersect, necessitating their cooperation, however reluctant. As in preceding series entries, the narrative style consists of Samuel’s opinionated written account. But this time, Carpenter (Economies of Blood, 2018, etc.) offsets the vamp’s typical snootiness (he believes all humans and werewolves are stupid) with Joe’s alternating, more amiable accounts. But both perspectives are often humorous. The author also skillfully showcases other narrative modes: a surprise third narrator later in the story and Joe’s condensed, animalistic voice when in wolf form. While the novel is lively and entertaining, it’s occasionally predictable, from who’s ultimately behind the baddies’ scheme to the inevitable converging of Samuel’s and Joe’s cases. Still, it’s fun to watch these two striking heroes at work, whether they’re independent or together.
An endlessly appealing supernatural tale with two charming protagonists.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-580861-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.
Latest installment of the long-running (since 1915, in fact) story anthology.
Helmed by a different editor each year (in 2018, it was Roxane Gay, and in 2017, Meg Wolitzer), the series now falls to fiction/memoir writer Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See, 2014, etc.) along with series editor Pitlor. A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s full of surprises for something in such a convention-governed genre: The apocalypse in question is rather vaguely environmental, and it makes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go seem light and cheerful by contrast: “Jimmy was a shoelooker who cooked his head in a food zapper,” writes Adjei-Brenyah, each word carrying meaning in the mind of the 15-year-old narrator, who’s pretty clearly doomed. In Kathleen Alcott’s “Natural Light,” which follows, a young woman discovers a photograph of her mother in a “museum crowded with tourists.” Just what her mother is doing is something for the reader to wonder at, even as Alcott calmly goes on to reveal the fact that the mother is five years dead and the narrator lonely in the wake of a collapsed marriage, suggesting along the way that no one can ever really know another’s struggles; as the narrator’s father says of a secret enshrined in the image, “She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right.” In Nicole Krauss’ “Seeing Ershadi,” an Iranian movie actor means very different things to different dreamers, while Maria Reva’s lyrical “Letter of Apology” is a flawless distillation of life under totalitarianism that packs all the punch of a Kundera novel in the space of just a dozen-odd pages. If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension, a theme ably worked by Weike Wang in her standout closing story, “Omakase,” centering on “one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.”
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-48424-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.
His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.
This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.
Pub Date: April 7, 1952
ISBN: 0679732764
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1952
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