A solid new entry into the horror scene filled with anxiety and dread.
A tiny Australian town is beset by a nightly horror-filled mist in Murphy’s debut.
The town of Nebulah was a small but bustling town until nine months ago, on the winter solstice, when the mist appeared. Now the population has dwindled to six, the last remaining stragglers who have nowhere to go coming together in the evenings to keep each other safe. Pete was once a police officer and relies on that experience to help keep everyone together and in contact with the nearest town as his group slowly whittles itself to nothing. When a young girl and self-proclaimed psychic shows up at his door one night, sheltering with him from the storm of nightmares outside, she implores him to leave town before the coming solstice, or it will be the end. Her words ring in his ears as he spends the coming months trying to figure out how to convince the last remaining townspeople to leave with him. With a similar energy and frantic dread as that found in Josh Malerman’s Bird Box, Murphy has constructed a world in which the idea of a town plagued by an actual calamity that is somehow ignored by the outside world is completely believable. To complicate the question of why the residents don’t just leave, Murphy subtly builds a secondary monster in the state benefits system that traps these lower-income townspeople in place without the money to rescue themselves. The juxtaposition of the legitimate terror in the town and the residents' cool treatment from the rest of the country, emphasized by a scene of Pete visiting his estranged daughter, only adds to the uneasiness of the book. The seductive monsters are almost more inviting than the outside world.
A solid new entry into the horror scene filled with anxiety and dread.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78909-235-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Titan Books
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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