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RESURRECTION MAN

A peculiar yet fairly persuasive fantasy from the Canadian author of Passion Play (a 1993 paperback) whose premise is that magic started to seep back into the world after WW II. Those capable of working magic are known as ``angels.'' But there is, of course, a downside: Horrible, blood-thirsty ``minotaurs'' appear spontaneously in parts of town and must be shot by police. Dante Ratkay is an embryonic angel afraid to allow his powers to blossom, while his dark shadow of a brother, Jet, is convinced that someone stole hisJet'ssoul when he was a baby. With Jet and sister Sarah, Dante discovers a corpse in his room; what's worse, it's his own! Using the surgical tools of their pathologist father, the three dissect the cadaver in the boathouseonly to uncover a huge and evidently terminal cancer. Is Dante fated to die in a few days? Well, the close-knit Ratkay family harbors any number of dark secrets: Jet's resentful boyhood rivalry with his brother apparently involved several attempts to kill Dante. Eight years ago, Sarah had a miscarriage, and now she's haunted by the ghost of an eight-year-old girl. Aunt Sophie's husband, Pendleton, gambled with a devil's Sending for the soul of Sophie's unborn child, and lost; Pendleton drowned himself, while the child became Jet. Dante must flex his emerging magic powers to discover the truth and resolve the potentially disastrous conflictsespecially when his father abruptly drops dead, and Dante realizes that the body they found was not his after all. Volatile and sometimes overwrought, but nonetheless absorbing and distinctive.

Pub Date: July 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-441-00207-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Ace/Berkley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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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

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THE TESTAMENTS

Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.

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Atwood goes back to Gilead.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.

Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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