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
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.
A young Muslim’s American experience raises his consciousness and shapes his future in this terse, disturbing successor to the London-based Pakistani author’s first novel, Moth Smoke (2000).
It’s presented as a “conversation,” of which we hear only the voice of protagonist Changez, speaking to the unnamed American stranger he encounters in a café in the former’s native city of Lahore. Changez describes in eloquent detail his arrival in America as a scholarship student at Princeton, his academic success and lucrative employment at Underwood Samson, a “valuation firm” that analyzes its clients’ businesses and counsels improvement via trimming expenses and abandoning inefficient practices—i.e., going back to “fundamentals.” Changez’s success story is crowned by his semi-romantic friendship with beautiful, rich classmate Erica, to whom he draws close during a summer vacation in Greece shared by several fellow students. But the idyll is marred by Erica’s distracted love for a former boyfriend who died young and by the events of 9/11, which simultaneously make all “foreigners” objects of suspicion. Changez reacts in a manner sure to exacerbate such suspicions (“I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees”). A visit home to a country virtually under siege, a breakdown that removes the fragile Erica yet further from him and the increasing enmity toward “non-whites” all take their toll: Changez withdraws from his cocoon of career and financial security (“. . . my days of focusing on fundamentals were done”) and exits the country that had promised so much, becoming himself the bearded, vaguely menacing “stranger” who accompanies his increasingly worried listener to the latter’s hotel. The climax builds with masterfully controlled irony and suspense.
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.Pub Date: April 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101304-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
A good beach read, set in a beach town.
A fast-paced novel about the enduring friendship of three young women who spent their summers in Avalon on the Jersey shore before dispersing across the country.
The book opens with Kate, now a lawyer in the girls’ original hometown of Philadelphia. Kate’s fiance, a man she met in law school, breaks up with her the same day she learns she is pregnant with their baby. Then we meet Vanessa, now living in New York City. Vanessa has given up her career as an art dealer in the city to raise her daughter Lucy and is struggling with her husband’s confession that he recently came close to cheating on her. Then we meet Dani, an aspiring novelist who has just lost her job in a bookstore in San Francisco. Dani is still dealing with drug and alcohol addictions and is still looking for Mr. Right. When the three decide to get together and spend the 4th of July holiday back in Avalon, they are each haunted by memories of Kate’s twin brother, Colin, who tragically drowned there eight years earlier when they were all on the cusp of adulthood. Woven into the mystery of Colin’s demise are other issues of childhood that influenced each of the young women. As they look back on the painful past and flirt with future opportunities, the women finally share the secrets they had kept all those years, forgive one another and prepare themselves to move on in positive ways.
A good beach read, set in a beach town.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220381-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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