Ruland (Big Lonesome, 2005, etc.) combines dark humor with a thorough understanding of human frailty in this offbeat gothic...
The lives of three people on the edge collide at a haunted California casino.
The winding road leading through a mesa on the Yukemaya Indian reservation to the Thunderclap Casino invites its victims to come make a killing. But all Alice wants is to make a living as a slot technician. While she’s working on the Loot Caboose, one of the most popular games at the Thunderclap, she smells sulfur. The next thing she knows, she’s lying on the floor of the Forest of Fortune with the raucous sound of the attract sequences in her ears. When she watches the security tapes later, she sees not only that she had a seizure, but that a ghostly woman floated near the machine and then climbed into it. For new employee Pemberton, Thunderclap is a chance to win back his fiancee, whom he lost—along with his last job and his license—because of his fondness for alcohol and cocaine. Although writing cheesy promotional copy for the casino is hardly the acme of his career, he hopes Thunderclap will save him. Lupita’s vocation is playing the slots in steady wins with hot streaks that she can’t predict. She also comes to the run-down casino when she’s lonely instead of spending time with her family. But her need for the drama of gambling, Alice’s choice of a roommate and unwillingness to accept the medical basis of her continuing visions, and Pemberton’s boozing and snorting away his chances for a happy life bring all three steadily closer to destruction. Even at the soul-sucking Thunderclap, however, hope has a chance over cynicism, greed and commercialism. Perhaps the spirit of Ramona, the stern-faced woman who looks down from a portrait in Pemberton’s rented cabin, is also watching over the struggling souls at the Thunderclap.
Ruland (Big Lonesome, 2005, etc.) combines dark humor with a thorough understanding of human frailty in this offbeat gothic gambling tale.Pub Date: July 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4405-7989-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tyrus Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
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
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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