A delightful, intricate maze of a novel.
In Hicklin’s debut SF novel, a woman takes a strange job in a strange town.
When her beloved—if unconventional—Uncle Amos dies, Wilma Dunn learns that he had left her assets, property, and “confidences” in his will. All she has to do is travel to the mysterious town of Crate and speak to his lawyer, one Lattimer Fernico. With her best friend Dot Vander in tow, 22-year-old Wilma—on a break from college to decide what she wants to do with her life—heads to the surprisingly difficult-to-find hamlet of Crate, population 3,087. It seems Amos has left Wilma his seat on the Crate town council, an office she is expected to fill immediately. She’s also to take over Amos’ job as Crate’s official maintenance specialist. “He made sure the machinery of the town ran smoothly, responding to internal error calls and so forth,” Fernico explains vaguely. “I believe he had a sort of ticker in his house that alerted him to faults.” Armed with the new tools of her trade—including a medallionlike key that unlocks most doors—Wilma begins to explore Crate and its eccentricities: a library filled with board games, 3D-printed funnel cakes. Then come the stranger discoveries, like the missing store mannequins, the fact that Amos died coughing puffs of green smoke, and the mysterious underground tunnels that run beneath the entire town. Wilma is eager to complete the work that Amos began, though it seems as though others may go to lethal lengths to stop her. Hicklin’s plot is a clockwork puzzle with many spinning gears, some of them literal. When Wilma discovered that a jogger fell through a hole in the street, she “expected to see a sinkhole or a breached storm drain. Instead, she saw a deep shaft filled with protruding wheels and oscillating pistons, stretching down farther than she could see.” Told in an offbeat, slightly heightened style, this labyrinthian novel has many wonderful secrets to offer for those willing to plumb the depths of Crate.
A delightful, intricate maze of a novel.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781068328800
Page Count: 330
Publisher: ASAP Imagination
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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