A nasty, freaky, and haphazardly funny horror story.
A punk-rock vagabond circa 1977 and a struggling Hollywood stuntwoman circa 2013 find themselves connected through a grotesque paranormal underground society.
Whatever those guys are smoking over at Cracked.com is working—this is the fourth good novel from a contributor, following David Wong’s John Dies at the End (2009) and This Book Is Full of Spiders (2012) as well as Wayne Gladstone’s Notes From the Internet Apocalypse (2014). Brockway (Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity, 2013, etc.) takes a less flippant approach to his over-the-top horror show, but humor and verve still bleed through in the voices of his vibrant lead characters. We meet Carey Horton in the beating heart of Manhattan’s punk scene as he and his friends get smashed, thrash their way through concerts, and revel in their squalid DIY existence. But dark forces are awakening in the form of “unnoticeables,” or “empty ones,” which are human shells that now house something…else. “You look for humanity in human-shaped things, and when you don’t find it, your broken, clouded minds just glaze right over it,” one of them tells Carey. “We are like you, but missing your inefficiencies.” He also encounters “tar men,” which are Lovecraft-ian monstrosities with acidic, flammable goo spread over mechanical skeletons. The book leaps between Carey’s youth and the present day, in which we meet Kaitlyn Barr, a cocktail waitress who yearns to become a professional Hollywood stuntwoman. She’s also begun seeing angels, which is making her doubt her sanity. At a party one night, she meets former child star Marco Luis (a thinly veiled doppelgänger of Mario Lopez from Saved by the Bell, which is funny all by itself). When Marco forces a kiss on Kaitlyn, she feels something cold, metallic, and distinctly inhuman slither inside her. Who should rescue her but an aged, alcoholic, and homeless Carey? There’s a lot of cosmic mythology in between about blood rituals and the origins of these surreal angels and demons, but readers will enjoy themselves more if they just kick back and enjoy the wild ride.
A nasty, freaky, and haphazardly funny horror story.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7966-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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