by Jarret Middleton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 8, 2017
A subversive twist on Southern myths that’s surprisingly rich in its execution.
Two brothers return home to rural Arkansas to face their ordained destiny.
Middleton (An Dantomine Eerly, 2010) edits an imprint of Counterpoint Press and is clearly no stranger to the attractions of horror-tinged fiction. In his new novel, he spins an eerie Southern gothic about a down-on-his-luck country singer who comes home for his twin brother’s wedding. The book opens on Jordan Bayne, an ex-con and occasional country picker slumming in San Antonio. Jordan is a hot mess who has never been able to escape the shadow of his brother, Malcolm, a successful insurance agent, or his father, Walker, a legendary bluegrass artist. He is, quite simply, haunted: “From a place deeper than bone, Malcolm," he tells his brother. "A force pulling me into the dark. I tried to make it stop, but it didn’t come from one place; it came from all over, every inch of my body. I couldn’t run from it, neither. Wherever I went, there it was. Drinking ain’t a fraction bad as what’s calling out for me, brother.” This fractious reunion is set in the Ozark Mountains, and Middleton deftly captures the simmering violence and country noir that lie just beneath the surface of this rural veneer. There are strong female characters here in the person of Malcolm’s fiancee, Elizabeth Truitt, and Jordan’s old flame, Leah Fayette, but it’s a story rooted in male-on-male violence and its repercussions. As Jordan digs into his family history, he discovers that one of every set of twins in his family has always murdered their father. The book also offers up superbly creepy boogeymen in Andridge Grieves, a creature of local legend, and his minion, Obediah Cob. Along the way, Middleton deftly mixes history into his tale, unraveling the untimely ends of Jordan and Malcolm’s ancestors. It’s a well-carved story of a family’s curse, as brittle and grotesque as any works in the vein of Faulkner or O’Connor.
A subversive twist on Southern myths that’s surprisingly rich in its execution.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945814-29-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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