A sharply observed saga of workplace tyranny.
A magazine’s change of ownership precipitates skullduggery, sorcery and declining ad revenue in this corporate potboiler.
Manhattanites will network in any setting, so when Gladstone Magazine exec Barbara Blessington finds out her publication is for sale, she immediately informs her Wiccan coven-mate, Ballard Media vice president Daniel Davenport. While Wicca, as many characters attest, is a fine religion that has nothing to do with devil worship, and the nude–or rather “skyclad”–rites the coven celebrates every full moon are entirely wholesome, the publishing industry is a cesspool of satanic intrigue. Barbara and Daniel underhandedly engineer Gladstone’s purchase by Ballard Media. Installed as publisher, Barbara imposes a draconian regime of cost-cutting micromanagement, with longtime staffers abruptly fired and ejected from the building. This scenario will ring true to media insiders, but Wanderer, an industry lawyer, looks at it from the seldom-explored angle of advertising-sales operations. As Barbara replaces experienced managers with incompetents like the even bitchier VP of advertising Calista Hunt (who muses, “Decrepit old people…should be put to sleep like dogs in a shelter”), ad pages and employee morale wither. Battling the reign of terror is Gladstone’s L.A. ad rep Forest Green, an old-school “believ[er] in fairness and justice” whose stellar sales numbers don’t shield him from Calista’s machinations. The author clearly knows this territory–its poisonous office politics and corporate gargoyles–and occasionally spices it with further skyclad rituals in which Barbara beseeches the goddess Diana or casts an impotence spell on a cheating lover. Wanderer’s prose can be a bit stiff, with characters sounding like they are giving PowerPoint presentations–“With our sales staff being limited to advertising categories that our audience of federal government managers will buy, we can’t go after categories like automotive, travel and other consumer areas.” Further, Forest’s battle against Calista and Barbara gets bogged down in the minutiae of mundane contract wrangles, mileage reimbursements and catering logistics. Still, the two villainesses make memorable examples of why arrogant bosses are more fearsome than witches.
A sharply observed saga of workplace tyranny.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-50961-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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