A largely lackluster addition to the haunted house genre.
A man’s new home might be the epicenter for a powerful evil in this first installment of Cooper’s horror series.
Kevin Swan comes into possession of a 97-year-old house in the remote wilds of California (somewhere outside Pasadena), where the closest town is a small mountainside village. With only his German Shepherd, Princess (“a strapping, adult male, rescue dog; the unfortunate moniker had come with him”), for company, he soon begins to notice strange happenings in his new home. Tired of bickering with his dog like they’re an old married couple, on a whim Kevin picks up two homeless men from a parking lot to help him around the manor in exchange for room and board. The motley crew quickly realizes that supernatural occurrences are happening with increasing frequency; books about dark magic randomly appear, and they find a chalkboard with weird runes written on it. Kevin attempts to get help from a Caltech professor with an interest in the occult, but neither he nor “Spooky,” another casual dabbler in the dark arts, can provide many answers. Kevin resolves to figure out the mystery of this haunted house or die trying as he encounters more dark forces at play. Cooper tells a strange tale that adequately unsettles but often loses itself in long-winded tangents that are a slog to follow and sometimes even confusing to the reader. Sudden switches to different perspectives, such as that of a knife or a Chinese woman called “Shenzhen Lady,” occur with no explanation for their purpose within the narrative. The writing is disjointed and overly descriptive, lingering on unimportant moments of housework or inner musings in favor of furthering the plot. The characters are either barely present or one-dimensional, with Kevin the only one given a detailed backstory. The ending is a head-scratching cliffhanger that leaves room for a sequel that will hopefully have more answers than questions.
A largely lackluster addition to the haunted house genre.Pub Date: May 11, 2022
ISBN: 9798810054955
Page Count: 495
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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