Newcomer Dietz’s fevered, often cryptic style makes for a narrative fascinating and annoying in equal measures.
This historical fiction about a doctor’s attempt to expose a fake medium dramatizes the uneasy juncture of two highly controversial if burgeoning movements in 1890s England: spiritualism and Freudian psychology.
A respected doctor of the mentally ill, Ambrose Gennett is frustrated by his colleagues’ resistance to the new theories in psychology. Lily Embly, who has long earned a hand-to-mouth existence assisting her mother at séances, finds herself popular with a more lucrative clientele—Ambrose’s social set—when she’s taken under the wing of a charlatan friend of her now dying mother. Lily and Ambrose have a cute first meeting: He helps her when she’s knocked on the head at Victoria Station. The attraction is ambiguous. Despite his rigid disbelief in omens, Ambrose mistakenly takes a comment Lily makes as a warning about his mother. He also misreads in Lily a textbook case of neurosis he thinks he can cure by the new methods. His murky obsession with Lily turns hostile when he discovers her holding a séance in his mother’s house. Believing each is out to destroy the other, Ambrose and Lily fulfill their own prophesies. Jealous of his interest in Lily, Ambrose’s married mistress makes a public fuss that causes Lily’s creditors and Ambrose’s employers to assume a romance is taking place. When Ambrose crashes a weekend house party where Lily is to conduct a séance which will pay her enough to get out of debt, he not only destroys Lily’s career but his own reputation. Roughed up by her creditors, Lily disappears. Initially Ambrose is charged with her murder, then committed to an insane asylum where decades later he discovers that Lily has surfaced in New York. She now works for a psychiatrist. After all, the skills of instinct and analysis required are the same she used in her old profession.
Newcomer Dietz’s fevered, often cryptic style makes for a narrative fascinating and annoying in equal measures.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-35284-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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