The World War II setting and supernatural cast are promising, but a great deal of the narrative feels like place-setting for...
A young Hungarian woman prepares to fend off Hitler (and his army of Nazi werewolves) in this busy supernatural thriller.
When we meet Magda, the narrator of this first novel in a planned trilogy, it’s the summer of 1939 and she’s living a quiet life in Budapest, working for a vampire in a café. Magda knows her lineage as a witch of the Lazarus clan, but she's only modestly skilled with her powers. She gets an opportunity to improve quickly, though. Her sister, Gisele, is having horrific prophetic visions of the war and Holocaust that will soon consume Europe, and because their Jewish heritage puts their lives in danger they plot not only to make their escape from Hungary but also to do battle against the evil spirits Hitler is marshaling. Doing so requires getting hold of an ancient book, The Book of the Angel Raziel, and keeping it out of the Nazi’s hands, though the power contained in the book isn’t entirely clear. This novel is largely a travelogue of Magda’s journey across Europe to find the book, and through the astral plane as well: Devoured by a pack of SS werewolves, she’s sent to heaven, but capable of returning if she so chooses. That flexibility plays into the theme of free will with which Lang infuses the story, as Magda confronts spirits, family members and soldiers on both sides of the imminent war. That gives the novel some philosophical heft but relatively little action, and the codes of conduct in Lang’s spiritual world sometimes seem arbitrary. Firm prohibitions against calling on certain spirits, for instance, prove to be toothless, and it’s not clear what harm, if any, death brings. The book is enlivened by a couple of entertaining cameos by war photographer Robert Capa and from Hitler himself, accompanied by his “paramour, the werebitch Eva Braun,” but the story culminates in a battle that resolves little.
The World War II setting and supernatural cast are promising, but a great deal of the narrative feels like place-setting for the next installment.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2317-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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