Maybe it’s art. Maybe it’s spiritual. Like a psychotropic redemption high.
Real badass. Yeah.
When black Los Angeles tax-lawyer Charles Harmon is told by his wife Beverly that she’s pregnant, Charles falls into nightmares of her having a three-eyed baby, the third eye cobalt blue in the baby’s cheek. Shit. Charles is under an infinite hill of Yuppie Scum irritants and frustrations. Fuck. “Charles Harmon? Uppity Nigger Charles. Thing is, uppity niggers get beaten down.” He hits the rails as an FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America). Trouble is, lots of peckerwood gangers also ride the rails—and they love to gangbang Charlies and Yuppie Scum out on freedom larks. So Charles gets George Plimpton to stand up for him—George Plimpton is a wooden goony stick with a sharpened piece of steel that ’bos use for protection, and with George Plimpton at his side Charles Harmon becomes Brain Nigger Charlie, whom nobody toys with. Chocolate Walt, Charlie’s mentor on riding the rails and nominated as King of the Hoboes at the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa, calls Brain Nigger for help. Will he find Corina Leslie, Walt’s niece, for him? She’s a high, high yellow 17-year-old riding the rails in the Pacific Northwest. Charlie, not just whacked out on drugs but by now deep into dementia, agrees. Now, as Ridley fans know (Stray Dogs, 1997; Everybody Smokes in Hell, 1999, etc.), the female is the deadlier of the species, although Brain Nigger will find himself up against psycho ’bos and killer yard bulls flashing clubs and rubbing the pieces strapped to their legs. Many deaths dog him, and when he finally finds Corina, she’s a mule for a neo-Nazi drug dealer and has swallowed over a dozen condoms full of drugs, can’t evacuate them, and is being chased by the bad guys. “Stay with me, all you’re going to end up is limp in a ditch,” she warns him. Actually, things end up worse than that.
Maybe it’s art. Maybe it’s spiritual. Like a psychotropic redemption high.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41182-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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