An absorbing, suspenseful tale of man versus his bestial nature; entertaining but not for the squeamish.
A debut thriller, set in the California wilderness, follows an ambitious TV reporter.
Rebecca January Coulter is an attractive actress with a minor sex scandal in her past, and she hasn’t been shy about using her physical assets to advance her career. She works in Hollywood as a reporter on a reality TV show, chasing weird or offbeat stories for their entertainment potential rather than their news value. Her latest assignment is to check out tales of “wild men” living in the Ventana Wilderness of Los Padres National Forest, near Big Sur. Her preliminary investigation yields multiple accounts of a “humanoid beast” roaming the woods and harassing campers, complete with eyewitness accounts and grainy video. The possibility of a sensational encounter with a Bigfoot-like creature is enough to get January assigned to flesh out the story into a full on-air segment. She heads into the wilderness with a backpack and four technicians lugging sophisticated sound and video equipment in hopes of capturing a glimpse of the “wild men.” She and her crew get more than they bargained for when they become embroiled in a deadly contest with Robert Bruckner, a desperate criminal who’s submerged himself into the forest and evolved into a heartless predator bent on survival at any cost. In this diverting novel, Wise has crafted a page-turner that explores what can happen when a toxic combination of bad luck, abandonment, and a rash act of extreme violence strips away the veneer of civilization from a man. The engrossing book is divided into three parts, with January narrating her thoughts and experiences in the first and third sections and a third-person account of fugitive Bruckner’s story sandwiched in between. Though the pacing is a bit uneven and the violence depicted is often gruesome, the characterization is vivid, with January especially coming to life on the page. But the abrupt ending leaves the reader unsatisfied, with a lot of questions hanging.
An absorbing, suspenseful tale of man versus his bestial nature; entertaining but not for the squeamish.Pub Date: March 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4834-6592-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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