The promise of Richard's story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World (which won the 1990 PEN/Hemingway Award) is only fitfully apparent in his surrealistic first novel about a boy and his first sea voyage. He is a reject, this eponymous Fishboy, ``thrown from a car into a side-road swamp.'' He has always done for himself. His home is a box, and his nemesis is Big Miss Magine, an enormous black woman out of a nightmare. He works with fish, hence his name, shucking shellfish, hauling baskets alongside black workers, mostly women, by the shore in the South. He longs to go to sea despite his puny size and effeminate ways. He gets his chance when the crew of a small ship brawl with the fishworkers. Fishboy stabs Big Miss Magine in self-defense, loses consciousness, wakes to find himself on board. This in an ill-omened ship (Fishboy has already seen the ship's cook axed to death) with a crew of criminals and freaks (an idiot, a tattooed giant, an inside-out man); in their company, Fishboy is diminished into just another luckless cabin-boy, without a goal to put some spine into a mÇlange of anecdotes, little fables, riffs on rogue waves and ship's cooks (Richard is oddly fixated on cooks and spit-in-the-soup routines). And the touches of magic realism (the giant's tattoos are a body-map to guide him to the mermaid who saved his life) seem secondhand. Eventually, battered by a rogue wave, Fishboy finds himself back on land, the main ingredient in Big Miss Magine's cooking-pot, his last stop before ghosthood. The transition from short-story to novel has proven difficult for Richard (a story titled ``Fishboy'' appears in his collection); and his incantatory style, thrilling at the start, looks too effortful over the long haul.*justify
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-42560-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jones hits his stride with a smart story of social commentary—it’s scary good.
A violent tale of vengeance, justice, and generational trauma from a prolific horror tinkerer.
Jones (Mapping the Interior, 2017, etc.) delivers a thought-provoking trip to the edge of your seat in this rural creature feature. Four young Blackfeet men ignore the hunting boundaries of their community and fire into an elk herd on land reserved for the elders, but one elk proves unnaturally hard to kill. Years later, they’re forced to answer for their act of selfish violence, setting into motion a supernatural hunt in which predator becomes prey. The plot meanders ever forward, stopping and starting as it vies for primacy with the characters. As Jones makes his bloody way through the character rotation, he indulges in reflections on rural life, community expectations, and family, among other things, but never gets lost in the weeds. From the beer bottles decorating fences to free-throw practice on the old concrete pad in the cold, the Rez and its silent beauty establishes itself as an important character in the story, and one that each of the other characters must reckon with before the end. Horror’s genre conventions are more than satisfied, often in ways that surprise or subvert expectations; fans will grin when they come across clever nods and homages sprinkled throughout that never feel heavy-handed or too cute. While the minimalist prose propels the narrative, it also serves to establish an eerie tone of detachment that mirrors the characters’ own questions about what it means to live distinctly Native lives in today's world—a world that obscures the line between what is traditional and what is contemporary. Form and content strike a delicate balance in this work, allowing Jones to revel in his distinctive voice, which has always lingered, quiet and disturbing, in the stark backcountry of the Rez.
Jones hits his stride with a smart story of social commentary—it’s scary good.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3645-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers will love the quirky characters in this clever yarn. Pendergast and Coldmoon make an excellent pair.
The 18th installment in the Pendergast series by Preston and Child (City of Endless Night, 2018, etc.) gives the hero a partner in the hunt for a strange killer.
A woman walks a dog in a Miami Beach cemetery, and her dog finds a human heart. Soon more hearts turn up at the gravesites of women thought to have committed suicide a decade before. The FBI assigns agents Pendergast and Coldmoon to work with the Miami PD on the case. Pendergast is highly successful in closing cases on his own but “was about as rogue as they came,” and suspects tend not to survive his investigations. Agent Coldmoon’s secret assignment is to keep a close eye on his partner, “a bomb waiting to go off,” who tends to do something “out of left field, or of questionable ethics, or even specifically against orders.” The current victims are women whose throats have been slit and breastbones split open to remove their hearts, all in quick and expert fashion. The killer leaves notes at the graves, signed “Mister Brokenhearts.” This kind of weirdness is in Pendergast’s wheelhouse, as he’s an odd sort himself, quite outside the FBI culture. Rather like Sherlock Holmes, he sees patterns that others miss. He’s tall, gaunt, dresses like an undertaker, and always seems to have more money than the average FBI agent. Both men are great characters—Coldmoon curses in Lakota and prefers “tarry black” coffee that Pendergast likens to “poison sumac” and “battery acid.” They wonder about the earlier deaths and whether the women had really hanged themselves. For answers they require exhumations, new autopsies, and a medical examiner’s close examinations of the hyoid bones. Meanwhile the deeply troubled killer ponders his next action, which he hopes will one day wipe away his pain and guilt and bring atonement. Alligators, bullets, and a sinkhole contribute to a nerve-wracking finish.
Readers will love the quirky characters in this clever yarn. Pendergast and Coldmoon make an excellent pair.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4720-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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