Exactly the sort of novel a literary blogger would write. Proceed with caution.
The devil went down to Brooklyn, looking for a little help from some hipsters.
In a story that can’t decide at all whether it wants to be parody or horror, this debut novel by Bushnell shudders to an unpredictable end. Our hero is Billy Ridgeway, and he’s a giant loser. A wannabe novelist who works at a sandwich joint in Brooklyn, he can’t even carve out enough privacy to hook up with his sort-of-girlfriend, Denver. His life is thrown for a loop when he returns to his ratty apartment one morning to find Lucifer Morningstar himself sitting on his couch, ready with a PowerPoint presentation of his pitch to Billy. The devil, it turns out, needs Billy to steal a powerful talisman, the Neko of Infinite Equilibrium, from a nearby warlock named Timothy Ollard, in return for a lucrative book deal. “Just walk into the horrible tower and get the stupid cat and give it to Satan and everything could be different. You could get your book published. You could save the world,” Billy muses. Added to the mix is the Northeast Regional Office for the Right-Hand Path, an international conglomerate of witches and warlocks. This is all played for arch comedy in the vein of Christopher Moore or S.G. Browne, but there’s something off-putting about the execution of Billy’s deity-riddled adventure. First of all, Billy and his poet/filmmaker/actor buddies are all frivolous urban clichés with no real substance. Secondly, Bushnell’s plot stays focused on the back-stabbing Brooklyn literary scene, with a denouement that centers on a disastrous literary reading and a rivalry with a smartass critic. (This is long before Billy and a companion are transformed into sex demon wolf things, mind you). It’s imaginative in some ways, but a plethora of deus ex machina tricks reveal that there’s not much heavy lifting going on behind the curtain.
Exactly the sort of novel a literary blogger would write. Proceed with caution.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61219-315-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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