by Jeff Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2016
A briskly paced, splatter-filled crime novel to delight fans of directors Tarantino and Rodriguez.
A murderous, thieving werewolf gets tripped up plying his trade when he’s co-opted by a shadowy cabal.
Tattoo artist, musician, and writer Johnson chronicled his colorful life in a memoir, Tattoo Machine (2009), and here makes his first foray into fiction with a nasty, snarling bit of supernatural noir that’s reminiscent of the more gruesome novels of Chuck Wendig or Joe Hill. The protagonist of this Portland-based crime novel is Gelson Verber, a century-plus-old half-breed werewolf who’s learned a few tricks in his day but who's kind of having a bad run. “The Experiment wasn’t working,” he confesses as the book opens. That particular treatment involved damping down his furry ferocity by downing fistfuls of tranquilizers, gallons of scotch, and the not-so-occasional roofie. Gelson plies his trade by hunting down local scumbags and selling their belongings to his fence, Lemont. Things go awry when he encounters one Linda Morgan, aka “Miss Misery,” an employee of the mysterious Salt Street Development company. There, he learns that not only do they know who he is, but they also know what he is—and they intend to blackmail him into doing their dirty work for them. It’s here that Gelson finally meets another of his kind, Christophe, a werewolf who is faster, stronger, and far more dangerous. But it turns out there’s more to Gelson Verber than meets the eye. As the hard man of this particular slice of genre, the guy is a fantastic character: ruthless but not without humor, a master grifter who’s been doing this a very long time, and a stone-cold killer whose methods can be shocking even within the pages of this horror/crime fusion. Along the way, Johnson throws in Gelson’s target, a communications magnate who has gotten on Christophe’s bad side; Izelle Tatum, a savvy transsexual who’s only hustling to make the bread for sex-reassignment surgery; and a pair of plot reversals that are likely to leave readers with their jaws on the floor.
A briskly paced, splatter-filled crime novel to delight fans of directors Tarantino and Rodriguez.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-593-76648-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Share your opinion of this book
More by Jeff Johnson
BOOK REVIEW
by Jeff Johnson
by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
14
Google Rating
New York Times Bestseller
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
Share your opinion of this book
More by Douglas Preston
BOOK REVIEW
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Mark Z. Danielewski
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.