A dizzying epistolary novel about dreams, perception, and the human psyche.
A mysterious manuscript tells the story of one man’s plunge into the abyss.
To quote Winston Churchill, welcome to a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Campbell offers a wicked metafictional mystery in this slim but artful debut novel. Try to follow along. In an introduction, the author says he received the mysterious manuscript, containing transcripts of three cassette tapes, in 2006. The tapes had been transcribed by Amrapali Anna Singh, a professor of archival studies in Alaska, at the request of a man named Pierre Cavey, who had very nearly circled the world to bring her the tapes, marked with the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires. Then we get to the tapes themselves, which chronicle the journey of an unnamed American journalist. The first depicts a hallucinatory voyage into the bayou on a snake-hunting expedition. The second reveals a little more. A friend of the journalist explains that his search for meaning in the world is a search for “The City of Dreams”—a myth that connects dreams to a place from various historical sources, with examples from Cortés to Dr. Livingstone’s ill-fated voyage. “The point is, it’s a myth—a mirage in the margins of conjecture and hearsay,” the narrator is told. And indeed, the narrator becomes obsessed with finding the mysterious destination, traveling from Kowloon to Mongolia. Finally, in the third tape, the narrator travels to Istanbul to meet “The Turk,” a mysterious chess champion who has more questions than answers. “You have gone around the world collecting the most odd of odd things—experiences of a fantastic order...in a swamp with an old man, in a desert filled with tents and in the belly of a fallen city,” says the Turk. “Tell me, are you chasing your dreams?” Campbell’s afterword offers little explanation other than his abortive attempts to find out the identity of the narrator, but the experience of reading the book remains arresting.
A dizzying epistolary novel about dreams, perception, and the human psyche.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937512-57-6
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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