Absurd, slightly unhinged storytelling about confronting your demons.
McKee debuts with dystopian, speculative fiction about a hoodie-wearing teenager who finds he’s a character in a book.
In this satirical novel, McKee’s antihero asks people to call him “Oh, Ok” in part because “my family’s last name is embarrassing.” His adventures start in his bedroom, when a voice coming out of his computer tells him he’s a character in a book, identifies itself as “The Author,” and warns him, cryptically, “Don’t trust the woman.” Oh, Ok thinks he’s dreaming, but an armor-wearing, sword-bearing woman bursts through a window, tells him his time of death is near, and kills him. He wakes up to find a girl named Sen—a homunculus really, disguised as a hot, miniskirted, teenage girl—sitting by his bed and calling him “Master.” Unnerved but also aroused, he learns the book he’s in is part high fantasy, part science fiction, part horror novel: It’s a volume in which he dies and is revived multiple times, falls through dimensions, runs from monsters, and ultimately faces the truth about someone called “The King of the Dead.” On this uncomfortable journey, McKee asks readers to confront their demons, the worst part of themselves, as he also does, in a surreal, weird, disorienting narrative. His book abounds with barely readable dialogue and overdone pop culture references as it uses a very meta, self-aware storytelling method that purports to examine how good people can simultaneously be terrible people who occasionally spout sexist, racist, and homophobic lines. The result is messy, self-serving, and aware of it. “Is this whole story a prop?!” the book asks. “Are we just shallow ends to meet shallow means? Is this whole thing a setup to allow for usually unacceptable and socially inappropriate topics to be breached without causing the … stirring and rumbling of the political masses?!” The real question is whether anyone will care when the novel has so much to offend so many readers.
Absurd, slightly unhinged storytelling about confronting your demons.Pub Date: May 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63988-346-2
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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