A fast-paced hell ride of depravity that occasionally rests on genre clichés.
A sadistic clown with ties to outer space leads Alleva’s horror novel.
Jigglyspot is a half-human, half-warlock creature who typically dresses like a clown. He may only stand about 5 feet tall, but that doesn’t stop him from committing dastardly deeds like dispatching innocent people with a scalpel. Jigglyspot particularly enjoys consuming a substance from a living person’s brain (a process he refers to as “extraction”). The activity makes him feel good and temporarily gets rid of the gin blossoms on his nose. The summer of 2019 finds Jigglyspot organizing a celebration for the solstice that involves the consumption of human flesh. Jigglyspot puts a great deal of effort into the event to please his extraterrestrial masters, including his favorite, a tentacled being named Kera. Meanwhile, a teenager named Tyler Reese shoots his classmate James Reilly after duct-taping him to a chair. Tyler deems it a fitting end for the drug dealer/bully/rapist, but James’ ghost soon begins to follow Tyler around. As the storylines of Jigglyspot, Tyler, and others eventually converge, violence, torture, and mayhem are on the menu—shocking horror is the author’s fare, and the narrative delivers a steady supply. As numerous characters are introduced there is always an opportunity for someone to be slashed, sexually violated, or, at the very minimum, threatened with the harm of a loved one. It’s bracing stuff and not for the squeamish. Dialogue and descriptive passages are not always as inspired as the gory material: One character remarks, without irony, “I can’t believe it. You killed me, Jigglyspot.” Alleva’s prose often leans on standard horror language, as when Jigglyspot speaks with a “raspy voice that carried a hint of laughter behind it.” Nevertheless, the constant churn of bloodletting, demons, and aliens will keep readers on their toes.
A fast-paced hell ride of depravity that occasionally rests on genre clichés.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9798218177881
Page Count: 570
Publisher: Chamber Door Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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