While unapologetically over-the-top, this supernatural tale maintains a fervent, magical pace.
In this final installment of a comical trilogy, a contractor faces zombies and other obstacles while trying to build a Renaissance faire.
Marc Sindri is constructing a permanent Renaissance faire in Arcanum, Ohio. Marc may be a skilled contractor, but his current assignment is anything but easy. To say that the work site has been awash with witchcraft, sex, and conflicting personalities would be an understatement. Book 3 begins in February, and with the planned opening of the faire in May, time is rapidly working against Marc. His first hurdle comes in the form of an angry phone call from one Jeremiah Stone II, who wants to know who stole his son’s body from the family mausoleum. Marc was certainly no friend of the caller’s son (also named Jeremiah), but he has nothing to do with the missing corpse. Marc soon finds himself fighting a reanimated version of the deceased in order to save his beautiful girlfriend, the witch Brenwyn. But this battle is merely the beginning of Marc’s struggles against the undead, as the area around the faire is infested with zombie rabbits and other unsettling creatures. Then there is the foreboding moment when, during a ritual between Marc and Brenwyn, it is predicted that the faire’s opening will be disastrous. Marc and his cohorts see themselves through their trials with abundant sexual innuendoes (one woman smiles at the idea of being “well-drilled”) and occasional wordplay (a character named Eleazer remarks: “I do not have a jealous bone in my body, milady, not even a bit of envious cartilage”). The result is a story that is more zany than clever, albeit with enough action to keep the wackiness from becoming dull. Whether it is naked witches performing a ritual or humans slashing at zombie animals, something is always happening. Readers may question certain details in Matulich’s (Power Tools in the Sacred Grove, 2015, etc.) novel, such as how Eleazer, who is supposedly successful at seducing women and uses terms like “milady” constantly, can talk to anyone without getting a good thrashing. But whether or not the faire comes together as a great success or failure, there is excitement in finding out how all the dust (and blood and amulets) will settle.
While unapologetically over-the-top, this supernatural tale maintains a fervent, magical pace.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-981160-94-5
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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