Many sly references to present-day politics and postures keep what is essentially a very gloomy trip from total darkness.
The old ones were right. Hell is a real place, underground, right where they said it would be. Time to fix that hole in the basement.
Long, who flirted with the supernatural in The Reckoning (2004) and scared the bejeebers out of armchair mountain climbers with The Wall (2006), sends armies of characters climbing miles underground into the tunnels, caverns, trenches, streams and rivers comprising Hades, for millennia the home of Hadads, Homo sapiens’ older, smarter cousins. Hadads, who didn’t hesitate to chow down on their surface-dwelling kinfolk when attacked by the munchies, were civilized ages before anything like writing or arithmetic spread through Europe or China. As a matter of fact, it was Hadads who tipped us off to most of our useful “discoveries.” None of that ancient savvy was, however, enough to protect them against greedy humans armed with 21st-century weaponry or good old fatal viruses, which wiped out the Hadads shortly after the family reunion. Or, rather, almost wiped them out. In the near future—as World Powers are busy carving out underground spheres of influence in order to tap the tremendous wealth beneath their feet, engendering competition as fierce and formidable as any in the cold war era—Hadads reappear. They stage a stunning raid on Halloween night, snatching nubile and nearly nubile girls and dragging them below to become mothers to a new generation of Hadads. But Americans don’t surrender their daughters.
Many sly references to present-day politics and postures keep what is essentially a very gloomy trip from total darkness.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8454-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
A perfectly balanced portrait of the human condition, encompassing plenty of anger, cruelty and loss without ever losing...
The abrasive, vulnerable title character sometimes stands center stage, sometimes plays a supporting role in these 13 sharply observed dramas of small-town life from Strout (Abide with Me, 2006, etc.).
Olive Kitteridge certainly makes a formidable contrast with her gentle, quietly cheerful husband Henry from the moment we meet them both in “Pharmacy,” which introduces us to several other denizens of Crosby, Maine. Though she was a math teacher before she and Henry retired, she’s not exactly patient with shy young people—or anyone else. Yet she brusquely comforts suicidal Kevin Coulson in “Incoming Tide” with the news that her father, like Kevin’s mother, killed himself. And she does her best to help anorexic Nina in “Starving,” though Olive knows that the troubled girl is not the only person in Crosby hungry for love. Children disappoint, spouses are unfaithful and almost everyone is lonely at least some of the time in Strout’s rueful tales. The Kitteridges’ son Christopher marries, moves to California and divorces, but he doesn’t come home to the house his parents built for him, causing deep resentments to fester around the borders of Olive’s carefully tended garden. Tensions simmer in all the families here; even the genuinely loving couple in “Winter Concert” has a painful betrayal in its past. References to Iraq and 9/11 provide a somber context, but the real dangers here are personal: aging, the loss of love, the imminence of death. Nonetheless, Strout’s sensitive insights and luminous prose affirm life’s pleasures, as elderly, widowed Olive thinks, “It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.”
A perfectly balanced portrait of the human condition, encompassing plenty of anger, cruelty and loss without ever losing sight of the equally powerful presences of tenderness, shared pursuits and lifelong loyalty.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6208-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
PERSPECTIVES
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.
A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.
Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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