A rollicking supernatural tale that will intrigue history fans and scratch their itch for adventure.
This historical fantasy debut sees soldiers hunt ancient, magical artifacts during the Mexican-American War.
In 1847, the United States battles Mexico for possession of North America’s western half. Lt. Jedediah Faust stands aboard the USS Bunker Hill off the coast of Veracruz. Through an enchanted telescope, he watches some Mexican soldiers on shore who have fiery blue auras. These aren’t merely warriors—they’re men controlled by ghostly “tormentors.” Faust takes Sgt. Cormac McGuinness and Pvt. Benjamin Crowe ashore to hunt the creatures. His ultimate quarry is Viktor Chernyad, the Russian sorcerer responsible for animating the tormentors. Chernyad is a member of the Order of Exultus. He manipulates President Antonio López de Santa Anna’s troops so that he may locate the powerful Lamp of Shadow, rumored to be in Mexico. With the Lamp of Light already in his clutches, Chernyad needs the second object to open the dark dimension and free the vile wizard Tellurach, who would bring hell to Earth. Faust, for his part, would rather fight a war with mortals. But his lineage, including his father, Zebulon, has battled the Order for centuries. At a subterranean pyramid called the Pit of the White Serpent, Faust and company seemingly defeat Chernyad. While the villain escapes, the heroes take possession of the Lamp of Shadow. Zebulon pulls strings and sends his son to Paris to consult with Jacques de Molay, the “last Master of the Order of the Temple in Jerusalem,” about how to keep the artifact safe. The meeting broadens Faust’s mission substantially, encompassing the being called Arananth and the ancient city of Atlantis. Halleck’s series opener summons the kind of swashbuckling fun associated with Conan the Barbarian novels and Indiana Jones films. The well-rendered opening scene, with cameos by Gen. Zachary Taylor and Santa Anna, will convince readers that there’s plenty of adventure to be had without jumping continents. Historical details, including the Mexican army’s “antique artillery,” provide a narrative launchpad with gravitas. Yet confident storytelling and excellent pacing will ensnare readers, and the tormentors—“undead creatures whose souls have been twisted by dark magic”—only hint at the weirder tale ahead. The author’s prose spearheads each scene change in lines like this one, which depicts the heroes’ descent into the Paris catacombs: “Darkness fled from their torches like a ship cutting against a relentless black tide.” Intriguing characters interact with one another in entertaining ways. Throughout, Faust is rankled by Capt. Percival Blancheford, whose wealth and means supply transportation for the heroes. Crowe tells Faust: “You try to convince yourself that you’re better off without him, but you want to be exactly like him.” Numerous surprises lurk in the novel’s final third, including betrayal, death, and the femme fatale Capt. Zenobia Nubis. Audiences will forgive Halleck if his tale structurally resembles a football match, with the lamps bouncing between teams. He establishes a rich lore of “nine ancient cities” descended from the empire of “Alhur” and nonhuman entities called preternaturals (one of them being Balthazar Macabre) who may or may not interfere with mortal events. Both elements should allow the author an even deeper dive into strangeness for the sequel.
A rollicking supernatural tale that will intrigue history fans and scratch their itch for adventure.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-980960-12-6
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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