A skillfully rendered, if wearisome, thriller.
In this debut novel, a man wrongly imprisoned because of his resemblance to an escaped convict stumbles on an even darker conspiracy.
Greg is a model of mediocrity and happy underachievement—he’s always managed to just get by, living a life of “complacent dignity.” He becomes fascinated by the folklore surrounding an old, abandoned building that apparently houses something sinister, and he decides to investigate and maybe gather material worthy of a podcast. But he passes out suddenly, and awakes in what appears to be a hospital, though staffed with peculiarly unfriendly, taciturn nurses. Dr. Carver, a congenial but slippery character who seems to be in charge, informs Greg that they found him unconscious just outside the “facility,” which he unreassuringly describes as “a joint mental health and correctional facility that implements the lifestyle of a monastery.” Carver confesses that while Greg doesn’t belong there, he can’t simply be released. An inmate who bears a striking resemblance to him escaped. Carver wants to keep Greg incarcerated to placate potentially riotous prisoners and fend off the authorities. Kherbash adroitly conjures an atmosphere of menacing uncertainty—as Greg attempts to escape, he begins to reckon that Carver is experimenting on the patients in some sepulcher fashion. A shooting on the grounds creates an opportunity for a prison break, and Greg joins forces with a crew of inmates intent on escaping. But he’s flummoxed by his inability to distinguish between reality and his drug-induced hallucinations, a demarcation artfully kept ambiguous by the author. Who are these “singing sirens” Greg keeps hearing? And what are the strangely terrifying creatures that seem to haunt the building’s crawl spaces? The downside of Kherbash’s intentional injection of nebulousness into the plot is its inaccessibility—readers will have to make effortful and sometimes tedious strides to penetrate a nearly opaque story. Some readers may feel that the short novel is not worth the labor—as a whole, the plot is still presented within the grooves of a timeworn formula, a track from which it never really departs.
A skillfully rendered, if wearisome, thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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