Readers with an interest in the latest in literary experimentalism will thrill at Danielewski’s approach and clamor for the...
A young girl quests for a cat. And no, it’s not Alice in Wonderland.
What is Danielewski’s (The Fifty Year Sword, 2012, etc.) latest about? Might as well ask what the Coriolis effect is about: the world spins, and air blows, and that’s the way it is, much as this oversized, overstuffed book spins and—well, furthers the story begun last spring with One Rainy Day in May. Pre-adolescent Xanther is brainy, confused, and petulant: “Mom, like I hate the supermarket?” “You do?” “Oh, uhm, I love hanging around stuff I can’t have?” Xanther, whose favorite typographic symbol is an often sarcastic but sometimes genuinely puzzled question mark, is also cat-crazy, and ailurophiliac moments abound. Cats and their kin are just some of the animals that pass through these pages. So do many human types, from LA gangsters to Asian yuppies to Turkish cops to homegrown geeks. Miley Cyrus, too, one of many figures and tropes from pop culture to turn up. Match a herky-jerky narrative and multiple protagonists with nested-parenthetical stream-of-consciousness to do Joyce proud, and you’re in tall postmodern cotton, and with literary and subliterary allusions to match, tucked away among the tangled storylines: “A single piece of paper inside, with a fiery orange paperclip holding nothing together, makes it clear Warlock is no Connelly or Nesbø.” All fine and well, though there’s some iffy syntax (“Xanther’s scream calls to life the house”) and some odd attempts at Chinglish and other dialects (“at entrance jingjing see he the damn pah chiao one”). But no worries, if you can make out clauses such as this: “sleeps the little one [like a little cloud {a blind little lamb <ever a question mark <<of a different king ((kind!))>> >}].”
Readers with an interest in the latest in literary experimentalism will thrill at Danielewski’s approach and clamor for the 25 volumes planned to follow in the Familiar series. Others, not so much.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-375-71496-2
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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