Uncompromisingly brutal and black hole–dense; howls to a niche audience.
The Call of the Wild meets Mad Max in this blood-soaked, nihilistic thriller.
Brooks’ latest follows a traumatized protagonist struggling to find the right words amid copious casualty and senseless causality. The apocalypse has come and gone; the surviving world consists of two enclaves—that of the enemy Dau and the town, a walled, seaside citadel—and a no man’s land populated by wild dogs. Born to teenage parents on a wagon trail, captured and raised by a dog pack, and rehumanized by his uncle, first-person narrator Jeet has always struggled to resolve his dogchild double consciousness: His is a canine soul in a human body. Gun Sur, the town’s authoritarian Marshal, charges Jeet with recording the entirety of known history prior to a pending battle. When Chola Se, another dogchild, is abducted, delivered to the Dau, and brutalized by Pilgrim (Gun Sur’s second-in-command) upon her return, the dogchildren must untangle the Gordian knot of her ordeal, sorting out multiple murders, double- and triple-crossings, and the inconceivable contours of the looming showdown. Racial signifiers are limited to skin tone; Jeet has brown skin, and many character names evoke a South Asian feel. Jeet’s unconventional prose, lacking quotation marks, eschewing apostrophes, and employing novel compound words such as “Ime” and “weare,” eventually wears smooth. Chola Se’s gang rapes followed by a questionable consensual sex scene feel like a plot device for inflating the stakes, troubling an otherwise egalitarian tale.
Uncompromisingly brutal and black hole–dense; howls to a niche audience. (Survival thriller. 15-18)Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0974-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Grim indeed, without respite, often without rhyme or reason.
As a human family tussles against bitter seraphim in the underworld, misery runs constant—never waning, never tempered.
Waggener’s debut opens with a cryptic prologue by mother-of-three Erika. A car accident sends Erika to the underworld, accompanied by Jeremiah, an adult rogue (neither seraph nor human). Jeremiah refuses to explain anything, including whether Erika’s dead. He mutters arcane things and snaps when Erika doesn’t understand. That this motif, of a controlling male who keeps a woman in the dark, is common doesn't make it any less infuriating; that Erika falls for Jeremiah is predictable as well. What makes no sense is Erika’s demand that her children join her—as if people could travel to Limbo alive and unharmed. She visits them in dreams, unconcerned that those dream-visits are nightmares to them. Erika’s 17-year-old and 18-year-old sometimes narrate as the unrelentingly dismal plot moves through drowning, stabbings, metaphorical rape and breathless chases. The youngest child dies more than once. Generations-long sourness infuses both Erika’s family (alcoholism, abuse) and the seraphim (marital infidelity and a bastard child; black pages with white font tell Jeremiah’s parents’ thread). Limbo is a city slum. Moreover, although young-adult literature has no cemented definition, casting two of four protagonists as adults—Erika’s in her 30s—firmly removes this particular text from teen concerns.
Grim indeed, without respite, often without rhyme or reason. (Horror. 16 & up)Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-38480-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
While gay teens interested in paranormal romance and AIDS history could definitely do worse, this sometimes-busy and...
New York City in the early 1980s is a dark and dangerous scene, especially for a naïve young man from the Midwest.
Bryant Vess is staying with his cousin Wally and Wally’s boyfriend, Patrick, in New York City. Just as his new gay life is beginning to blossom with a sexy boyfriend, gay men across the city are beginning to fall ill with something that is, at first, called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. At the same time, a series of grisly murders occur in the bathhouses, spawning newspaper articles about the “Village Vampire.” A bathhouse tryst with a mysterious stranger leaves Bryant sick—but not in the same way as his friends; he can’t stand the light and craves raw meat. When he returns to health, Bryant becomes certain that the dark stranger saved his life through this sex act. He hunts the man down to convince him to save everyone and finds himself drawn into an ancient secret society full of mysteries and dangers. A loosely connected companion to In Stone (2013), King’s sex-filled novel makes the most of its setting; the New York City bathhouse scene makes for a potent backdrop. Readers may well find the story’s internal paranormal logic problematic, as it draws some troubling connections among vampirism, homosexuality and AIDS.
While gay teens interested in paranormal romance and AIDS history could definitely do worse, this sometimes-busy and disjointed coming-of-age journal makes for an uncomfortable read. (Paranormal romance. 17 & up)Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60282-971-8
Page Count: 367
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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