Moxon’s storyline isn’t easy to follow, but it makes for a tasty entertainment.
Sprawling, postmodern shaggy dog debut novel about a strange city made even stranger by new arrivals from the hinterlands.
Someplace in the decaying industrial heartland, inside a “gray donut of shuttered factories,” lies a place called “Loony Island,” most of whose residents live in Stalinist apartment blocks. The name is well earned if accidental, for in one of its quadrants stands a psychiatric hospital whose residents have been released to the streets, ministered to by an apparently self-appointed priest, bearded and denim-clad, who funds his church by means of a fat trust fund. Alas, Loony Island is run by a cabal of criminals who don’t have much time for the new insane constituency except to figure out how to rob them, of which Father Julius decidedly doesn’t approve. Among the bad guys are a would-be writer who’s “shit at it” and a young woman, tough as iron, who is far and away more competent than anyone else in the gang. Their efforts pale against the arrival of a very bad man from Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, home of Dollyworld and some very strange doings. Morris is on the trail of a young man named Gordy who appears to Father Julius as a flickering apparition. Morris, a Keyser Söze of the Smokies, drops his enemies, perceived and real, into “oubliettes,” or dungeonlike boxes, of which he is the proud inventor; it makes good sense, then, that he should tumble into a sewer whose manhole cover has been spirited away by the local tweakers. What Gordy has that Morris wants is—well, call it an instrument that allows “control over everything in the universe.” Against this background there are all sorts of memorable characters, including murderous rednecks from the Deliverance cutting-room floor, a bearded lady from a traveling circus, and the ever elusive Gordy’s worried father, who swears that he’ll never go back to Pigeon Forge as long as he lives. If the yarn doesn’t always add up and runs a bit long, it’s good fun to wind the characters up and watch them go.
Moxon’s storyline isn’t easy to follow, but it makes for a tasty entertainment.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61219-798-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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