Tongue-in-cheek literary amendments, all done without ridicule or a pretense of improving the beloved original.
Laidlaw (400 Boys and 50 More, 2016, etc.) revamps Shelley’s horror classic to include a bevy of monsters throughout the entire narrative.
Laidlaw presents readers with an ambitious Minimum Monster Guarantee—“At Least One Monster Per Paragraph,” he claims. He further promises that Shelley’s original text is intact, with all the new material merely additions. While the novel is in the mashup style of Stephen Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Laidlaw changes very little of the Frankenstein story. Many references to creatures are superficial, albeit amusing. For example, Victor Frankenstein notes that his love Elizabeth’s illness puts her “in the greatest danger it was possible to be in without a vampire feeding upon her or an alien chest-burster actually shooting out of her breast while she lay abed.” Still, the expanded tale is often humorous, and some of the modifications are outright shocking, including young Felix, who has an affinity for torturing animals. Laidlaw, meanwhile, effectively fuses his voice with Shelley’s. Accordingly, his contribution to the opening of Chapter 10 genuinely sounds like Victor’s woeful narration: “After a morning spent screaming in horror, I spent the following day roaming through the valley.” Monsters don’t make it into every paragraph; readers on occasion will have to suffice with lurid adjectives like “hideous” or the blunter “monstrous.” In the same vein, there are myriad horror films and TV shows cited, which reaches a crescendo in gleeful absurdity when Victor describes a castle as “something out of a Dracula or Frankenstein movie.” This likewise allows for an encyclopedia of horror icons mentioned, from literary (H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu) to cinematic (Godzilla and the Xenomorph aliens). Nevertheless, it’s hard to miss a few inconsistencies. Movie character Freddy Krueger’s name is spelled three different ways, and a pledge to avoid “random obscenities” is contradicted by preceding and subsequent expletives.
Tongue-in-cheek literary amendments, all done without ridicule or a pretense of improving the beloved original.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 249
Publisher: Freestyle Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2018
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
