This tumultuous romp, which shifts rapidly from one character’s viewpoint to another, is anchored by Trevena, whose warmth...
British psychiatric nurse Phil Trevena’s patients are dying, a frightening prelude to the potential loss of all reality—unless he and a time traveler named Daniel can rebuild the clock that commands the Dark Time flux.
Known for his fractured-reality short stories (Dogs With Their Eyes Shut, 2013, etc.), Meloy often mixes comedy and terror, as he does in this debut novel, in which the “devil-in-dreams,” a malevolent force, corrupts some of the Firmament Surgeons—those charged with keeping “the mechanisms of Creation running against the entropy arising from the fall of man”—into Autoscopes, who wage the paranormal Autosomachy war against hope. Linking both death and unmotivated violence to the theft of dreams (echoing Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane), Meloy builds a complex, confusing puzzle while deploying a muscular, humorous, profane voice, which can sometimes backfire. Take this image of “an elderly lady, kyphotic and bandy….” Kyphotic? Technically accurate, yet it stops a reader cold. Whether he links a mass shooting to a man-turned–crazed fish who rides a Mad Max–inspired armored mobility scooter or shows us how a psychiatric patient, Daniel, is really the time-altering “hypnopomp,” Meloy utilizes a daunting array of genre favorites: a zombie; talking animals; murderous, semiorganic machinery; vitreosaurs; a train named the Railgrinder (a nod to Railsea?); and Dune-like Dr. Natus, a living fetus in a bottle, “a dead baby with the mind of a god.”
This tumultuous romp, which shifts rapidly from one character’s viewpoint to another, is anchored by Trevena, whose warmth provides needed emotional continuity in a shocking, roiling, but imitative quest to protect human dreams.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78108-375-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Solaris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Certainly not for all readers, but anyone interested in seeing William Peter Blatty’s infamous The Exorcist (1971) by way of...
The wonder of friendship proves to be stronger than the power of Christ when an ancient demon possesses a teenage girl.
Hendrix was outrageously inventive with his debut novel (Horrorstör, 2014) and continues his winning streak with a nostalgic (if blood-soaked) horror story to warm the hearts of Gen Xers. “The exorcist is dead,” Hendrix writes in the very first line of the novel, as a middle-aged divorcée named Abby Rivers reflects back on the friendship that defined her life. In flashbacks, Abby meets her best friend, Gretchen Lang, at her 10th birthday party in 1982, forever cementing their comradeship. The bulk of the novel is set in 1988, and it’s an unabashed love letter to big hair, heavy metal, and all the pop-culture trappings of the era, complete with chapter titles ripped from songs all the way from “Don’t You Forget About Me” to “And She Was.” Things go sideways when Abby, Gretchen, and two friends venture off to a cabin in the woods (as happens) to experiment with LSD. After Gretchen disappears for a night, she returns a changed girl. Hendrix walks a precipitously fine line in his portrayal, leaving the story open to doubt whether Gretchen is really possessed or has simply fallen prey to the vanities and duplicities that high school sometimes inspires. He also ferociously captures the frustrations of adolescence as Abby seeks adult help in her plight and is relentlessly dismissed by her elders. She finally finds a hero in Brother Lemon, a member of a Christian boy band, the Lemon Brothers Faith and Fitness Show, who agrees to help her. When Abby’s demon finally shows its true colors in the book’s denouement, it’s not only a spectacularly grotesque and profane depiction of exorcism, but counterintuitively a truly inspiring portrayal of the resilience of friendship.
Certainly not for all readers, but anyone interested in seeing William Peter Blatty’s infamous The Exorcist (1971) by way of Heathers shouldn’t miss it.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59474-862-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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