Still, the reader will be forgiven for wondering what the point might be, other than that life is unfair, confusing and...
A novel of Los Angeles tormented by racial tension and gang violence in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict.
Readers who were alive and aware then will remember the news footage from Southern California when, on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted two police officers of using excessive force—though clearly King, an African-American, had been beaten. Novelist and street artist Gattis (Kung Fu High School, 2005, etc.) takes the rising post-verdict mayhem as backdrop for a series of linked, episodic stories in which Chicano gangsters, Anglo emergency responders, Korean vigilantes and members of just about every other ethnic group in melting-pot LA share the stage. As the book opens, a young food server remarks that he and a fellow worker, arriving at a catering site, “saw smoke, four black towers going up like burning oil wells in Kuwait. Maybe not that big, but big.” The violence soon sweeps young Ernesto up, as it does his co-worker, who bears, among other sobriquets, the resonant nom de guerre Termite. The latter lad aspires to something better, and he can be downright philosophical: “All of us are just some fucked-up little smart kids born in the wrong places….I mean, we’re not all smart. Some of us are just fucked-up or drugged out, but we do get fixated on shit.” Check. Gattis does a good job of rounding out and differentiating the 17 or so major players who figure in his pages, some phony confident and some Hamlet-like in their uncertainty (“we are technically vigilantes, and I don’t know how I feel about that”), and there are lashings of pyrotechnic violence and flowing adrenalin to keep the story moving.
Still, the reader will be forgiven for wondering what the point might be, other than that life is unfair, confusing and often ugly—and for that, we have the film Magnolia. Competent but not especially memorable.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237879-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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
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