Stories that are irreverent just as often as they’re unnerving—and sometimes a bit of both.
Hemmings’ (You Never Die in Wholes, 2012, etc.) collection offers a grab bag of short, eccentric tales, from the truly disturbing to the comical and even gleefully bizarre.
Readers will know what they’re getting into with the opening story, “The Man with the Crocodile Eyes.” It features 17-year-old Carly willingly basking in the warmth of a Cadillac owned by the reptilian-eyed titular character with a crooked arm who, as it happens, may not be the most outlandish part of the tale. Subsequent stories boast a sci-fi flavor (game programmer Oolong tries rescuing his virtual friend, Pilaf, in “Digisolution”) or suspense-driven alternative history (“Who Killed Sal Mineo?” follows the Rebel Without a Cause actor in his final days, leading up to his murder). Hemmings’ prior credits include works of prose and poetry, and much of the collection reads like vignettes more than fully developed stories—so he easily fits 36 into a relatively short book. “Mingus Hard,” for example, is rife with otherworldly details. An agency enlists Mingus to locate a bomb in the city, but lyrical descriptions make it difficult to decipher real from imaginary or metaphorical: Mingus “is kidnapped by a woman hard-wired to Electra-chain need.…She loves to intimidate by sketching hypothetical lives with accusative tones.” Likewise, many of the characters are wonderfully kooky, including dolls in “Women of Straw” or the animated at odds with Still Life in “Still World.” The best, however, is Mr. BubbleHead, highlighted in a series of misadventures, in which he braves a ride with a reckless cabbie (“Mr. BubbleHead Has an Exciting Day”) and, well…(“Mr. BubbleHead Loses His Head”). In spite of any peculiarities, a few stories are endearingly sincere. In “The Birds of Averrone,” for one, the narrator prays to “a select breed of air dwellers” to save him from his abusive father. Similarly, “The Killing Floor,” about contestants enduring a grueling 12-day dance marathon, is surprisingly delightful in its focus on just-matched couple Maggie and decidedly older Tom. The closing “Another Zombie Tale” encapsulates the collection: the recognizable (zombies) with the newfangled (waiting and hoping the zombie outbreak will merely pass).
Stories that are irreverent just as often as they’re unnerving—and sometimes a bit of both.Pub Date: July 25, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Hammer & Anvil Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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