A hilarious time-travel shaggy dog story.
A freak accident gives a Southern California man a working time machine in his basement.
Likable, unambitious Everyman Robert Packard (“like Hewlett-Packard, but without the money”) is happy enough with his life at the beginning of Emory’s strange, uproarious novel. He’s a glorified secretary and all-around gofer for a law firm that overpays him, and although his wife, Caro, can be a bit critical, he’s content in his off-hours to pursue his two hobbies: wine and technical tinkering on gadgets in his basement. When a freak lightning storm supercharges those gadgets and transforms them into a portal to the past, Robert sees a chance to make a one-of-a-kind killing in the wine market—by buying an 1860 Chateau Lafite from 1860 Chateau Lafite. The Frenchman passing by his portal is only too happy to sell him a bottle—for 10 gold francs. Robert tells them to come back to the portal a little later and hurries to the local antique coin shop to buy a coin of the right provenance, and soon he’s in possession of a bottle of wine worth $20,000 to modern-day oenologists. He can scarcely believe his luck (“Things like this happen to characters made up by Stan Lee,” he thinks, “not to me”), and he quickly decides to up the ante and kill two birds with one stone: He’ll not only obtain more valuable bottles of wine from the past, but he’ll do it by meeting one of his all-time favorite historical personages: U.S. president—and well-known wine enthusiast—Thomas Jefferson. And at first it works: Jefferson’s far enough ahead of his time not to panic at the appearance of a window from the future, and he’s hard up enough for ready money to part with some of the treasures from his cellar (he asks a stiff price: $2 a bottle). At first the scheme seems to be working perfectly, but Emory soon complicates it in half a dozen ways that all flow naturally from the plot’s central gimmick, and each new complication is funnier than the last—and all of them add up to a pitch-perfect comic novel. Enthusiastically recommended.
A hilarious time-travel shaggy dog story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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