Unremittingly bleak—provokes a reaction but ultimately feels hollow.
McCabe, never afraid to explore the grimmest parts of small-town Ireland, tugs the reader into an especially troubling portion of it in this novel about violation and madness.
In the early 1980s Redmond Hatch was a young man with a wife, a daughter and a steady job as a reporter at a small Irish newspaper. On assignment to cover old-fashioned ways in his hometown, he meets Ned Strange, an elderly fiddler who appears to have all the salt-of-the-earth traits that make for great feature copy. But horrific things come out of Ned’s mouth once he’s had a few—alarming suggestions about the misdeeds that Redmond’s father and uncle committed, along with jeremiads about the infidelities Ned’s wife committed, and how Ned punished her for them. Later, in London, Redmond’s career sputters and his increasingly violent temper drives his wife and child away; once he reads in the paper that Ned has died in prison, where he was sent after raping and killing a young boy, he’s off the rails. McCabe (Call Me the Breeze, 2003, etc.) deliberately makes it difficult to discern what’s fact and fiction in Redmond’s narrative, the better to evoke the mental instability that seems to swallow him whole; Redmond meets Ned in his dreams, plots to kidnap his daughter, becomes an acclaimed TV documentary director, remarries and repeatedly changes his identity. Or so he says—it becomes clear that Redmond both suffered and inflicted more damage than he initially let on. A few recurring sensory details anchor the story, like the taste of chocolate or a dampness in the air; John Martyn’s gentle folk song “May You Never” always seems to be playing, and it’s an ominous dirge by the time McCabe’s done with it. But those literary feints don’t keep the book from ultimately feeling like the deluded rants the novel’s supposed to transcend—and by the closing pages, McCabe seems to be going for shock effect.
Unremittingly bleak—provokes a reaction but ultimately feels hollow.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59691-163-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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