A portrait of heartbreak and loss of faith so wretched it may leave readers with raw nerves.
A religious studies professor wracked by profound grief seeks answers at the center of the world.
Egerton (This Word Now, 2016, etc.) visits bottomless tragedy upon his protagonist in this descent into one man’s personal hell. Oliver Bonds is reduced to living in a shed behind a beauty parlor in Austin, Texas. Slowly but elegantly, he reveals the circumstances of his toddler son Miles’ sudden death three years earlier. We learn that Miles died while Oliver was having a moment of temptation with a student, Ashley Briggers, now his counselor at the local homeless shelter. Oliver's trouble is multiplied when he's charged with his son's murder. His wife, Carrie, pregnant with a second son, sticks with him until his indiscretion is revealed during the trial. Now Oliver watches his son Archer at day care, a child who doesn't even know he exists. “Jesus, oh Jesus, I believed—as I had been taught by every film, every song, every Easter sermon—that love could conquer all,” Oliver tells us. “That love could survive all. It is not true.” Yet Egerton breaks up the awfulness of it all by surrounding Oliver with a colorful cast of characters. The most oddball is Lyle Burnside, a vagabond con artist and member of the local Hollow Earth Society, an organization planning an expedition to the North Pole to find the fabled entrance to the Earth’s core. “Manuel told me I could go mad or go God,” Oliver explains. “But there’s another option. I’ll carry my complaints to the center of the world and ask why the world is the way the world is.” Oliver also visits Martin, a terminally ill patient he was helping with hospice care prior to his son’s death. Martin is living with a violent pimp named Sam and a prostitute named Laika, who may not be what she seems. There is murder here, and forgiveness, and ultimately a redemption that doesn't necessarily equal resolution.
A portrait of heartbreak and loss of faith so wretched it may leave readers with raw nerves.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-940-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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