Vivid, pithy tales that are, by turns, amusing and appalling.
In this short story collection, characters find themselves in eerie, disturbing, and revenge-fueled circumstances.
Brantley Feldpausch, in the particularly memorable “Daddy Longlegs,” is quite fond of the spiders at his New York farmhouse. But when he inadvertently kills a beloved arachnid during a shower, the spiders see it as outright murder and plot their vengeance. Many of the tales here are equally dark, even when they don’t belong to the horror genre. In the case of “Soiled Utility: A Love Story,” a heart surgeon reluctantly falls for a maintenance worker at her hospital. It’s an unorthodox but romantic tale that takes an unexpectedly grim turn. Similarly, “Malapert’s Dilemma” is pure SF, following Valencia Malapert, of the planet Oxyplesbia, who may not be the only alien gathering information on Earth. Revenge, though a recurring theme, doesn’t propel every story. One example is the pre–World War II “Little Green Eye,” in which a radio show ultimately leads to an otherworldly—and terrifying—encounter for a Chicago retiree and his cat. Bachelder paints his tales with vibrant details: “The clapboards were warped and discolored from years of exposure to the rugged Vermont winters, and a portion of the roof over the wrap-around porch was caved in and near collapse.” At the same time, there’s a healthy share of gruesome imagery, like spewing vomit and cadaver-related acts. In the penultimate story, “The Doomsday Hour,” Reginald Conklin is a death row inmate in New Jersey. With his execution on the horizon, he can’t anticipate the surprising events unfolding in the prison, culminating in an especially gut-churning conclusion. This is unquestionably a collection readers won’t easily forget, with a cast that includes a freelance embalmer on the lam and a tankful of lobsters whose escape comes with retribution against a loathsome night-shift manager.
Vivid, pithy tales that are, by turns, amusing and appalling. (dedication, preface)Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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