A book that manages to break your heart, make you dizzy, and punch you in the gut all at once. You will be hard-pressed to...
The lone survivor of a cult tries to readjust to life as an average citizen, but when he meets a girl whose quest for honesty and happiness reminds him of his younger self, his future begins to look like his past.
Mason Hues’ life has been one horrible situation after the next. His adopted father’s predatory behavior propelled Mason to run away from home to join The Survivors, a cult whose members inject the drug Cytoxin—commonly used in chemotherapy treatments—which sickens them to the point of immobility. The closer the cult members get to death, they say, the more they gain a new appreciation for life, an appreciation which evolves into a longing to spread their “teachings” to others and culminates in a mass murder-suicide called the Day of Gifts. After surviving the Day of Gifts, Mason spends time in a juvenile penitentiary and a psychiatric ward, then rejoins society and meets Talley, with whom he forms a relationship that soon begins to follow the same downward spiral as Mason’s life with The Survivors. With his second novel, Stenson (Fiend, 2013) proves to be a more articulate, more empathic, and more intelligent version of Chuck Palahniuk. Stenson’s sentences devastate, and his characters are nuanced and warm, which makes the terrible things that happen to them and the terrible choices they make more painful to read about. Stenson’s cutting descriptions of drug use, violence, and nihilistic despair suffocate the reader like a noose. Here's his description of "the American Dream," for example: “Every conversation is one-sided, a mirror reflecting looks and status and wealth. Every person is steeped in want…filling themselves with goods and sex and alcohol and validation so they forget about the fact that they all will die.” Themes of immortality, sacrifice, self-hatred, and the artificiality of modern life feel new in Stenson’s world, a world teeming with prophetic visions, existential provocations, and ideological assertions that will leave readers questioning the way they lead their lives.
A book that manages to break your heart, make you dizzy, and punch you in the gut all at once. You will be hard-pressed to find a novel as dark or intense in any bookstore.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945814-31-0
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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