A pleasing comic novel with fatal stakes and a cynical edge.
Simon explores the unlikely effects of a cancer diagnosis in his darkly comedic debut novel.
Eliot Abrams is the chief marketing officer of De-Lish Chix, “the fifth largest franchise food operation on the planet.” When he meets people, he can accurately guess what cars they drive and how their offices are decorated. He has a beautiful wife, who runs her own business, and two young children. He has a golf handicap of 4. He never gets hangovers. When people meet him, they say things like, “You’re obviously a very smart man.” The only real problem in his life is that his job requires him to live in provincial Kansas City, Missouri. Oh, and that he’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Also—and this is just a smallish thing—he’s decided to murder his boss. With a probable death sentence hanging over his head and feeling ever less in control of his fate, Eliot attempts to reassert his own agency and go down swinging. As the oppressive clouds of his careerist lifestyle gather and darken, Eliot plots an act of liberation, learning that a proximity to death (his own or someone else’s) makes him feel alive in ways he’s never encountered before. Simon is a highly capable storyteller with a fluid sense of scene and a snarky sense of humor. He treats his plot and his characters with a refreshingly disdainful glee: this is not a story meant to tug on the reader’s heartstrings but to invite readers to fantasize about the sort of freedom that people normally forget they possess. Eliot is witty and humorously morose but not immediately likable: he’s arrogant, elitist, and self-centered. Yet this is what makes him an engaging character. He feels suitably real and therefore enticingly dangerous. Not that realism is Simon’s project. Drama and comedy are heightened just enough to make the novel a work of highly entertaining fancy. The book is longer than it needs to be, but questions about the lives that hang in the balance—along with Eliot’s quips —keep the reader turning pages to the end.
A pleasing comic novel with fatal stakes and a cynical edge.Pub Date: July 12, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 566
Publisher: 11 Barberry Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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