A grim but thoroughly enjoyable tale set amid urban horrors.
In Arginteanu’s debut novel, supernatural forces run rampant in 1980s New York.
The book opens on a nostalgic note that quickly turns dark: Teenagers Carl and Anthony are wasting time in a Staten Island area called the Dump (“a landfill that you could see from space”) in the pre-internet era: “Nowadays, Staten Island teenagers are glued to smartphones and huddled in cool, dark hideouts, like albino bats,” notes the third-person narration. “Nowadays, if no one's posted it online, it’s not real.” When their play fight becomes suddenly serious, Anthony is gravely wounded when his head hits a rock, and Carl, prompted by an insistent voice in his head, leaves his friend to die.The voice belongs to a supernatural being named Preta, who goes by the name of Pete and “promises the world but delivers only misery.” Pete is a servant of a being who calls himself “the man downstairs,” who’s tied his corporeal form to a dive bar called Azazel’s Public House, where profits are measured “not in dollars and cents but in increments of misery.” Carl wonders if the fact that he’s hearing Pete’s voice means he is going insane, but others hear Pete as well, including a young woman named Gina who, over the course of the novel, displays an aptitude not only for hearing Pete’s evil suggestions, but for resisting them as his elaborate plans escalate to their climax. Arginteanu’s prose throughout is vivid and colorful, and he keeps his narrative bubbling with interest by filling it with a large cast of well-defined characters, from barmaid Holly, who “wore her long blonde hair in braids and carried herself like a mighty Valkyrie,” to Dr. Clancy, who'd “notched countless neurosurgical triumphs and suffered fewer disasters than most.” The author does a remarkably skillful job at mixing casual brutalities of life with the uplifting qualities of existence that stubbornly persist—although, perversely, readers may find themselves rooting for Pete above all.
A grim but thoroughly enjoyable tale set amid urban horrors.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798846651418
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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