A chilling book about an office’s trapped soul that doubles as a black-comedy horror story and a genuine cautionary tale.
In this debut novel, a demonic presence haunts—and manipulates—the employees of a California accounting firm.
The Bay Area Financial Firm is only a medium-sized accounting firm but can offer an accountant more experience in a year than any of San Francisco’s Big Four. Despite the poster claiming it was voted one of the “Top Places to Work,” the firm is a high-turnover environment that fosters savage competitiveness and workaholism. One night, the posh and enigmatic Han visits a manager named Dylan, who barks at his subordinates and possesses an unwrapped present for his daughter’s missed birthday. Han reminds Dylan that, because of stiff competition at the firm, it could be two years before he’s up for promotion to senior manager. Dylan slits his wrists. His body is found the next day by Jesus, a respected senior manager, and Nicole, a lowly associate. Dylan’s soul, however, wakes in the office, unable to escape the premises. Han, a demonic, shape-shifting, mostly invisible presence, tells him, “I'll give you two months to get me one soul.” Dylan doesn’t need to guess what Han wants with the soul—because the creature has already started eating him, eyes first. A fresh crop of associates, including Eve, Gloria, and Lucy, must navigate firm cutthroats, like the newly promoted Nicole, and survive the machinations of a dark being that delights in human misery. Alderete’s portrait of the firm reads like a workplace tell-all and all but demands a score card to keep track of the slippery alliances and petty betrayals. As someone tells Eve, “Life isn’t like high school. It’s high school that’s a preview of life.” The characters’ cattiness proves to be Alderete’s great strength, and lengthy conversations run the emotional gamut while detailing office gossip and accounting minutiae. Readers are occasionally treated to the libidinous demon’s antics (“Han brought Dylan closer to his face. He licked Dylan’s neck and nibbled on his chin”). By the end, readers see the very real—and frightening—effects that unchecked greed and ambition have on individuals.
A chilling book about an office’s trapped soul that doubles as a black-comedy horror story and a genuine cautionary tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 586
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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