Less Pride and Prejudice than True Blood—not that there’s anything wrong with that—and a witty demonstration of how...
A rollicking second installment in the adventures of Jane Austen, vampire.
Now that her novel Constance has hit the bestseller lists and been picked up by Hollywood, and she’s succeeded in vanquishing her undead nemesis Violet Grey, née Charlotte Brontë, you might think that the troubles would be over for bookseller Jane Fairfax, née Jane Austen (Jane Bites Back, 2009). But when you’re a vampire who’s secreted yourself in Brakeston, N.Y., dreading the time when all your mortal friends will die, trouble has a way of finding you, and not just in the form of sycophantic nuisances like romance reviewer/literary tour guide Beverly Shrop. Item: Kelly Littlejohn, Jane’s wondrously sympathetic editor, becomes an agent and is replaced by Jessica Abernathy, the editor from hell. Item: Her sweet boyfriend Walter Fletcher announces that he’s Jewish and that he’s told his visiting mother that Jane is taking conversion classes with a local rabbi. Item: The contract Jane signed for the film adaptation of Constance gives the producers the right to sex up the story and relocate it to 1950s America (“people are in love with the fifties now,” director Julia Baxter sagely informs her). And of course Lord Byron, the wastrel vampire who turned both Jane and her archenemy into vampires, is at it again with one of the twin clerks at Flyleaf Books (is it Ned or Ted Hawthorne? Byron really can’t tell them apart). To top it off, Brakeston turns out to be playing host to more vampires than Jane had realized—in fact, the most recent arrival is turned by none other than Jane herself—and more vampire hunters as well. What’s a decorous centuries-old novelist who needs her neighbors, her sweetie and frequent doses of blood to do?
Less Pride and Prejudice than True Blood—not that there’s anything wrong with that—and a witty demonstration of how beautifully the dilemmas of being Jane Austen and a vampire can comport with the tropes of chick lit. You’ll thirst for the conclusion of the trilogy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-51366-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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
A new edition of the by now classic collection of affiliated stories which has already established its deserved longevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1963
ISBN: 055338256X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963
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