A potent story of a religious community, featuring characters that burst with energy.
The leader of a religious group, increasingly wary of enemies, takes her followers down an uncertain path in Kramer’s (Criminal Decision, 2012) psychological thriller.
In the 1970s, after spending time in an ashram in India, Malkeeya wants to teach the “Cosmic Love” concepts that she’s learned to the world, starting in the United States. There, she slowly gains clusters of followers around the country by advocating harmony and unity—a “Cosmic Oneness.” Then it’s revealed to her in a vision that she’s from Agape Armonia, a Utopian planet where she and her followers will one day spend eternity. Malkeeya advocates free love and pressures her adherents to tithe half or more of what they earn. But she shocks nearly everyone, including her right-hand man, Master Paul, when she splits couples and families among different clusters, believing that such attachments distract from spiritual growth. Malkeeya is also worried about the community’s enemies, especially after she reads a scathing article on Cosmic Love that implies that it’s a cult; the Jonestown deaths are still fresh in the public’s mind, after all. She becomes paranoid, and she plans an alarming way for her followers to protect themselves. Ex-spouses and grandparents of Cosmic Lovers, meanwhile, use the courts to gain custody of some of the community’s children, but tragedy is still on the horizon. Kramer’s somber tale spotlights the first-person viewpoints of three very different characters: Malkeeya, who’s convinced of her message and bizarre origin; Master Paul, her childhood friend who often questions her methods; and young Poppy, who, with her mother and little brother, escapes an abusive household to join Cosmic Love. Paul is a likable voice of reason, and he discovers paternal feelings when Malkeeya relegates him to a kid-laden cluster. In Poppy, the author offers a fine depiction of innocence; her diary entries are filled with rambling sentences and cutesy misspellings, such as “sychologist.” But Malkeeya is the most intriguing figure: a biracial woman who’s cognizant of an intolerant, divided society while also the embodiment of much-desired Oneness.
A potent story of a religious community, featuring characters that burst with energy.Pub Date: May 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5452-1913-3
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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