It’s the usual fantasy stuff, in other words, derivative of but much inferior to the Tolkien/Lewis/Peake schools of yore....
By Crom and Ishtar, Batman: There’s a minor epidemic of sword-and-sorcery epics out there, and now one of them is long-practicing fantasist Bakker’s sequel to The Judging Eye (2009).
As readers familiar with that book know—and if you haven’t read the first volume, you’ll need to—Anasûrimbor Kellhus is “the Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas.” His job description requires him to fight the forces of the Apocalypse here, the weirdlings of the frozen Ancient North there—in short, there’s not much time for golf or a Hawaiian vacation in a place where the gods and one’s kinfolk alike have it in for you. That world is a diverse if violent place: Think of it as Canada and Brazil with magic wands and battleaxes, with the North always coming in ahead, since “commerce with the Nonmen had allowed them to outstrip their more swarthy cousins to the South.” More swarthy? Nonmen? Gulp. The shades of D.W. Griffith are fainter than those of J.R.R. Tolkien, of course, with whom comparisons are naturally to be drawn. And in that Bakker is found wanting, for though this volume is dauntingly big, not much happens in it—there’s a lot of back story and a lot of talk, but not much of it adds up. Oh, there are grandmasters of the “Gnostic School of Sohonc,” of course, and Anagogic Schools, and practitioners of Inrithism and victims of “the Inrithi persecution of sorcery”; there are brave warriors of something called the Great Ordeal, which is more descriptive than the author might have intended; there’s a character who can “scry our scrying;" and there are witches and wizards but, at least, seedy brothels in the place of groaning-board inns. Not many of the venues are attractive; “the omnipresent smell of rot seemed to take on a sinister tang,” says our narrator, which unfortunately speaks volumes.
It’s the usual fantasy stuff, in other words, derivative of but much inferior to the Tolkien/Lewis/Peake schools of yore. Take it as good news or bad, but another volume in the series awaits.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59020-464-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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