A tongue-in-cheek ghost story that winks at the haunted-house trope without bringing much that’s new to the table, though a...
The perennial reinventor of classic horror turns his sights on the traditional English haunted-house story.
The Naremores, having suffered through an epic family meltdown, decide to move from London to the Somerset countryside to reconnect with one another, a prospect that seems dismal at best until the family stumbles as if by magic onto the Hollow, a rambling orchard house that was, until recently, the home of twee children’s book author Louise Magellan Teazle. Miss Teazle’s series featured haunted locations and friendly ghosts, and the family begins to suspect that her stories might not have been entirely invented. The Naremores—father Steven, wife Kirsty, teenage daughter Jordan and precocious son Tim—are pulled into the orbit of the Hollow, and welcomed by its longtime ghostly inhabitants, in different ways. Kirsty finds a magic chest of drawers that makes objects disappear, then reappear after they’ve been disturbingly deconstructed; Tim plays soldier in the orchard with the spirits of the Hollow; Jordan finds her shawl floating in midair; and Steven thinks maybe, just maybe, the house will heal a rift in the family that he’d begun to think was irreparable. But it isn’t long before Miss Teazle’s irritating fan club begins imposing on the Naremores, and the ghostly presences start to turn on the family. Before long, Tim’s playing at soldier starts to seem less like a child’s game and more like preparation for an all-out ghostly war.
A tongue-in-cheek ghost story that winks at the haunted-house trope without bringing much that’s new to the table, though a few moments of genuine fright should thrill readers looking for a new take on an old classic.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78116-558-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Titan Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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