An amusing but garrulous bacchanalia of sex, guns, and talking pigs.
In this comic action novel, a former sniper takes on a swarm of mutant hogs in rural Texas.
The feral hogs of South Texas are becoming a problem. “Two million brawling, fornicating, filthy beasts despoiling the best grazing land in the world,” as rancher Amanda Cross puts it. “Most intelligent mammal around. Smarter than a porpoise. In fact the ones that have been despoiling the Cross Bar Ranch seem to have become unusually smart.” That’s why Cross has hired Ray Puzo, a Special Forces sniper who has spent the last 17 years dealing death in Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Hunting a few hogs sounds like an easy job to Ray, though the task quickly proves to be much more than he bargained for. For one thing, the Cross Bar Ranch is some 450 square miles in size. For another, Ray immediately embarrasses himself by getting beaten senseless by a vaquero outside the local watering hole. For a third, Cross’ 30-something daughter, Loretta, is an unstable, violent nymphomaniac who seduces Ray (mentioning that she’d love for him to kill her father). Oh, yeah, and then there’s the minor issue of the pigs themselves, who turn out to be a horde of superintelligent mutants who can speak and fire guns and go by punny pig names like Julius Caesar Pepperoniopolis and Reichsfuhrer Genghis of Cannes. The hogs have launched a holy war (“jihog”) against humankind, and their primary target is none other than the man they see as the greatest threat to their continued existence: Ray. Can Ray overcome his PTSD-induced sexual problems and defeat an army of anthropomorphized hogs?
Woods’ prose is a postmodernist mix of clever wording and libidinous humor, as here where he describes the tale’s primary setting: “Viewed from above, say from a Chinese spy satellite or perhaps one belonging to the Department of Homeland Security, the Cross Bar Ranch assumed the amphibian appearance of a giant pollywog. Or a lusty spermatozoon.” The book is gleefully violent and raunchy, and it doesn’t try to make its protagonist—an amoral man who isn’t afraid to drop a racial slur—palatable in the least. Ray is a type familiar enough from modern Westerns and crime novels, and he feels at home here in this genre mashup. Unfortunately, the story’s treatment of its female characters—most of whom throw themselves at Ray at one point or another—leaves much to be desired. The tone isn’t funny so much as it is absurdist. There are nods to Animal Farm, but the novel has no real political agenda per se, and its spiritual predecessors are less Orwell or Vonnegut than they are 1980s action movies. Readers looking for brainless fun of a certain he-man variety will find it here. But given Woods’ talent for turning a phrase or setting a scene, it’s disappointing that he did not set his ambitions a bit higher.
An amusing but garrulous bacchanalia of sex, guns, and talking pigs.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 337
Publisher: Close to the Bone
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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