Masterful, amusing, and sent from Mars.
Kirkus panned Shirley’s Boschian The View from Hell as “Without question the worst book of the year” (2001), and Shirley charged us with missing the human side of his hellscape in a novel that remains the year’s grisliest lurid fiction.
Well, he has done it again, though this time adding a saving humor to his stinger’s grim message about the ghastliness mankind accustoms itself to—and the mind-bendingly horrific acts it accepts as part of daily life. Demons, less a pastiche than Hell, falls into two parts (the first published by Cemetery Dance in 2000). In the very near future, the world is overrun by seven clans of demons. These demons, who speak a hilariously schizoid Tartaran and eat cars, handicapped children, planes, and people by the tens of thousands, look like creatures out of R. Crumb: Tailpipes are massive leviathans, slugs with nothing like a head; multi-batwinged Sharkadians have heads that are all jaws, with a human female’s body and savage claws; Gnashers are abusively sadistic telepaths with human eyes but four arms and jaws like the Sharkadians’; and just as independently horrible are Grindums, Spiders, Dishrags, and Bugsys. Ira, Part One's nerdy storyteller, tells of the day the demons arrive in San Francisco while he romances Melissa Paymenz, the daughter of SFSU’s babbling professor of occult practices. Symbolic of mankind’s meltdown: a Central American country makes fast money as a vast waste dump, no farms, no forests, barely a village left: “Barges come from North America, Mexico, Brazil.” Only Melissa bears the Solar Soul, whose light will awaken sleepers from whom the demons emerge. In Part Two, nine years later, Stephen Isquerat investigates the Demonic Hallucination and finds endless governmental cover-ups.
Masterful, amusing, and sent from Mars.Pub Date: March 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44647-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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