A relentlessly grim trudge through uninteresting territory, with scant reward for the considerable effort.
Twenty depressed and/or depressing strangers meander toward a bad day.
First-novelist Walker’s mostly unsympathetic characters are loosely drawn together by the common threads of direct or close involvement in suicide and commercial air travel. An unfunny comic, a morgue assistant, radio talk-show host, airline pilot, actor, writer, shrink, air-crash investigator, self-help therapist, imposter self-help therapist, ex–flight attendant, murderous street person, air-traffic controller, former government agent, dead actress, and dead father of the dead actress boldly—all of these exhibit their neuroses in hundreds of vignettes. Comic John Heron’s idea of a laugh is bombing horribly and then faking his handgun suicide before the hostile crowd. He’s no crazier than Dr. Frankburg, the self-help therapist, afraid to be alone in his own office, hiring an actor with a sexy Welsh accent to be his voice on a self-help tape. And he’s certainly no worse off than Dr. Frankburg’s daughter, who authors a stream of suicide notes to her unbelieving father. Outwardly at least, the scariest of the lot is Edward Wiltshire—“The Fireman,” a street creature with a pyromaniac background and a current interest in car bombs who sometimes gets his direction from talk radio and performs self-surgery to get a look at his own liver. This bunch of nuts—some in England, some in Manhattan, some flying between the two—expose little of what made them crazed or of the grand scheme one assumes is emerging over the course of the 840-chapter countdown. Numbered in descending order, the format falsely suggests building momentum and a rewarding conclusion. Some of the “chapters” are blank, nothing but the chapter number; many are no more than a few words. With virtually no distinction in voice from one character to the next, be it Manhattan taxi driver or Scandinavian airline pilot, it’s tough to know which neurotic is babbling when. What is conveyed clearly is across-the-board desperation.
A relentlessly grim trudge through uninteresting territory, with scant reward for the considerable effort.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-053224-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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