A disturbing blend of fairy tale and Freudian strangeness which comments on the outlandish fatalism of the American myth.
A debut collection melds the European fairy tale with the American yarn into an assemblage of accidental magic, frustrated metamorphoses, and chance meetings with a bewildered divine.
Habermeyer’s stories inhabit the automated modernity of the 21st-century world in a way that recalls the lingering magic of the Grimm brothers’ deep, dark woods. In “The Foot,” an enormous human foot is tugged ashore and immediately becomes a focal point for gawkers, dilettante scientists, New Age worshipers, and feral children all focused on proving this miracle is more than just the sum of its part. In “St. Abelard’s Zoo for Endangered Species,” a controlling mother is mistaken for a snow leopard until she mistakes herself for a snow leopard and is then unceremoniously dumped back into her ill-fitting human life. Rife with this sort of untransformative metamorphosis, the stories linger in the forgotten spaces of the American mystique—hardscrabble towns that do not assume the dignity of their labor; bland suburbs that do not sanctify the families who inhabit them; miraculous visitations of God’s love or wrath that do not clarify the direction of the characters’ lives. In many stories (“A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Microgravitic Reproduction,” “Everything You Wanted to Know About Astrophysics But Were Too Afraid To Ask,” “What the Body Does When It Doesn’t Know What Else To Do”), Kafka’s surreal bureaucracies are blended with the particularly American myth of the homespun, and wholly unqualified, expert. Others (“Visitation,” “Ellie’s Brood,” “The Fertile Yellow,” “In Search of Fortunes Not Yet Lost,”) delve into the symbolic archetypes of woman as empty vessel, empty egg, source of arcane magic, castrating hacker of turkey necks and stacks of kindling. Crowded with metaphor and only loosely linked events, these stories can overwhelm the reader with the sheer vigor of their worlds; however, the total effect of all this ultrafamiliar strangeness is a provocative discombobulation that repays the patient reader’s perseverance.
A disturbing blend of fairy tale and Freudian strangeness which comments on the outlandish fatalism of the American myth.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-942683-60-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: BOA Editions
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.
Second part of an alien-contact trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, 2014) from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In the previous book, the inhabitants of Trisolaris, a planet with three suns, discovered that their planet was doomed and that Earth offered a suitable refuge. So, determined to capture Earth and exterminate humanity, the Trisolarans embarked on a 400-year-long interstellar voyage and also sent sophons (enormously sophisticated computers constructed inside the curled-up dimensions of fundamental particles) to spy on humanity and impose an unbreakable block on scientific advance. On Earth, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization formed to help the invaders, despite knowing the inevitable outcome. Humanity’s lone advantage is that Trisolarans are incapable of lying or dissimulation and so cannot understand deceit or subterfuge. This time, with the Trisolarans a few years into their voyage, physicist Ye Wenjie (whose reminiscences drove much of the action in the last book) visits astronomer-turned-sociologist Luo Ji, urging him to develop her ideas on cosmic sociology. The Planetary Defense Council, meanwhile, in order to combat the powerful escapist movement (they want to build starships and flee so that at least some humans will survive), announces the Wallfacer Project. Four selected individuals will be accorded the power to command any resource in order to develop plans to defend Earth, while the details will remain hidden in the thoughts of each Wallfacer, where even the sophons can't reach. To combat this, the ETO creates Wallbreakers, dedicated to deducing and thwarting the plans of the Wallfacers. The chosen Wallfacers are soldier Frederick Tyler, diplomat Manuel Rey Diaz, neuroscientist Bill Hines, and—Luo Ji. Luo has no idea why he was chosen, but, nonetheless, the Trisolarans seem determined to kill him. The plot’s development centers on Liu’s dark and rather gloomy but highly persuasive philosophy, with dazzling ideas and an unsettling, nonlinear, almost nonnarrative structure that demands patience but offers huge rewards.
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7708-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
