Sure to sate readers hungry for an old-fashioned zombie story that takes a few steps beyond standard fare.
Souza’s debut horror novel, the first of a proposed trilogy, tells the story of a small band of people in Maine holed up in a house and fighting to keep genetically mutated creatures at bay.
Famous novelist Thom Swiftley and his daughter, Dar, drive from Boston to see Thom’s brother, Rick, a noted scientist working on an isolated farm. Sickly livestock is merely the beginning of the carnage, as dead animals come back to life with a bite that results in eventual death—and the deceased return to life as stalking human/animal hybrids. Soon, others take refuge at Rick’s place, which is largely cut off from the world, while Thom just wants to make it back home to his wife and son. The author’s novel has traits of a zombie story—an endless onslaught of the living dead, survivors in a confined space and an implicit apocalypse—but he avoids yielding to formula by employing some creative spins. There are no true zombies, but rather infected beasts or transmogrified crossbreeds, and not all of them stagger around like ghouls; a number of creatures, mutated by birds, can even fly. Sometimes, the novel feels cluttered with ideas—Thom’s faith pitted against Rick’s science-based beliefs; scientific experimentation; global chaos in the wake of an economic collapse; creatures representing a potential next step in evolution, etc.—that could have been more gradually introduced and developed more deeply in subsequent volumes in the series. Thom, often with his family in mind, is mostly sympathetic, but Dar—a teenage girl who had attempted suicide shortly before the animals began attacking—is harder to like, as her strength never quite outweighs her immaturity; she resists authority, insisting that she’s misunderstood, just like any other teenager. The most impressive attribute is Souza’s well-thought-out setting, particularly during the winter months, when piles of snow keep the creatures at a distance and a bitter cold freezes the corpses. Readers may also appreciate the wily foreshadowing and a remark made about a college professor turning students into “liberal zombies.”
Sure to sate readers hungry for an old-fashioned zombie story that takes a few steps beyond standard fare.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1618680815
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Permuted Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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