A fun and often riveting novel that features mysteries of time, space, and unknown life forms.
Thuss’ (Fertility Zero, 2015, etc.) sci-fi novel tells the story of a small group of people trapped in a nightmarish town in the Nevada desert.
Every four years, Dale B. Yeager rides his antique BMW motorcycle 2,600 miles from Virginia to southern California so that he may place flowers on his parents’ graves. During his latest trip, at age 67, the divorced millionaire decides to stop in tiny NoTown, Nevada, which turns out to be aptly named, containing only a “cinder block motel,” a “gas station with two old rusted pumps,” and “an old rail car diner with a flickering red and blue neon sign.” The Rest Stop Motel seems to be a well-preserved but unremarkable relic of a bygone era. Upon check-in, Cyndy Ferguson, the young woman at the desk, makes some odd comments regarding the length of Dale’s planned stay. He takes a nap and wakes up to find that he looks 27 again. “You’re not crazy, Dale, and you’re not asleep,” Cyndy assures him when he returns to the lobby, alarmed. It turns out NoTown exists at an intersection where the 11 dimensions of time and space meet, and it’s impossible to leave the place by simply driving or walking away. Cyndy, like Dale, is in her 60s but looks as if she’s in her 20s; she’s a microbiologist who’s been trapped in NoTown for more than a year. Also, there are predators roaming the night that abduct humans and do unspeakable things to them. Dale decides to call them “Súls”: “what stood out most to me were the eyes, and Súl was the Irish word for eye.” With the help of other trapped travelers, Dale and Cyndy must find a way to escape the place before their wills are destroyed and they succumb to apathy, madness, or worse. The novel’s premise offers its readers a finely constructed puzzle that becomes increasingly and maddeningly complex as the story goes on, with rules that seem fixed but are revealed to be several degrees more complicated than they initially appear. Thuss’ prose effectively gets across the narrative shifts in tension, from long expositional conversations to more surreal moments, as in this passage, when Dale takes in his diner surroundings: “Everything was late 1940’s early 1950’s style: The plates, the silverware, all the decorations hung on the walls, and the red color of the vinyl in the booths. Everything but the small, decahedron shaped boxes mounted near the ceiling at each end of the rail car. We’re being watched, I realized.” The story is generally fast-paced and immersive, its twists are mostly surprising, and the ending comes before it overstays its welcome. Although the Súls are ultimately revealed to be a rather familiar foe, Thuss handles them well over the course of the novel, and he cultivates them into a truly terrifying adversary. Sequels appear to be planned, and they will be welcome when they arrive.
A fun and often riveting novel that features mysteries of time, space, and unknown life forms.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 173
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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