A novel-sized project unsuccessfully crammed into a novella-length format.
The first, fast-paced episode of an epic about a fractious family of immortal vampires.
Kadio Ledoro Lakt has had a rough life. By his 18th birthday, his entire family was dead, as well as his best friend and two fiancées–each of whom fell prey to a string of apparently unrelated tragic accidents. Even Jeremy, the vampire mentor whose brutal attack inducted Kadio into the ranks of the undead, has died, leaving him alone and adrift without family of any kind, mortal or immortal. The protagonist finds himself ill-suited to the life of a vampire–Jeremy never taught him how to hunt, and he feels only moral horror at the thought of killing the innocent. His only companions are a kindly nurse, Mother Pharren, who supplies him daily with fresh blood from a clinic (yet seems strangely uncurious about what Kadio really is), and her obnoxious, self-centered twit of a son, Heath, who is deeply suspicious and resentful of this strange boarder. Life on the farm with Mother Pharren isn’t family, exactly, but it’s all he has. Kadio’s solace is upset, however, by a chance encounter with a series of vampires introduced to him in dizzying succession. Kadio meets Ian, the vampire protégé of Leeran, Kadio’s blood brother by way of Jeremy. As a result of this encounter, Kadio meets a slew of other vampires, including Alec, Jayson and Chelsea. Barely moments after meeting, these characters begin fighting, biting, blood-drinking, love-making or exchanging notes about mystical vampiric powers like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, shape shifting and mind reading. The intention seems to be to keep the story moving, but the effect is that readers have little time to explore these characters’ backgrounds and motivations beyond a superficial level. Important revelations about the “immortal lies” of Kadio’s past are lost in the cacophony.
A novel-sized project unsuccessfully crammed into a novella-length format.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1441401311
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A terrifying new storytelling experience that affirms, even in our darkest moments, that love conquers all.
A female big-rig driver crisscrosses America searching for signs of the wife everyone else thinks is dead.
This spooky third novel by Welcome to Night Vale creator Fink (It Devours!, 2017, etc.) is similarly based on an original podcast and offers a more threatening but equally personal take on the horror genre. Switching from the podcast’s intimate first-person narration, delivered with powerful emotion by actress Jasika Nicole, allows Fink to stretch out into the more remote corners of his mythos while delivering the same scary beats. The main character is Keisha Taylor, whose wife, Alice, disappeared while working for the mysterious Bay and Creek trucking company: “No cause of death. No body. No certainty. There was a disappearance, and after a long and increasingly hopeless search, the presumption of death.” Now Keisha has taken a job with the company as a long-haul driver, which thrusts her firmly into the eerie mythology at work here. Keisha is a fascinating character partially because one of her defining characteristics is chronic anxiety, and it’s a potent imperfection for a character who battles literal monsters on a regular basis. Along the way, Fink unveils the strange universe that swallowed Alice whole, revealing an underground war between two secret societies, time-bending oracles, and other Lovecraft-ian horrors. He also gives Keisha a charismatic ally in Sylvia Parker, a teen on the run who becomes her “anxiety bro,” and a bloodcurdling enemy in the macabre, twisted police officer who stalks her across the span of the country. But the book also tempers its terrors with everyday humanity, portraying the mundane joys of love, the rich fabric of the American countryside, and surreal “Why did the chicken cross the road?” jokes that are a hallmark of the podcast. By the time Keisha learns Alice's fate, readers will realize that this marvelous character is more than the sum of her faceless anxiety or her very real fears.
A terrifying new storytelling experience that affirms, even in our darkest moments, that love conquers all.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-284413-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fascinating, and not for the faint of heart.
The final part of Islington’s prodigious, sprawling fantasy trilogy (An Echo of Things To Come, 2017, etc.), in which the religious-philosophical-magical-temporal war reaches its conclusion.
Again Islington supplies a synopsis and glossary; they help, but not much. The Venerate, immortal shape-shifting wizards, wield a higher-order magic called kan, which emanates from the Darklands. However, they now serve an evil god and perhaps always have. Four friends have resolved to defeat them. Caeden, a Venerate who once did terrible wrongs in their service, bears the knowledge that he will, or already has, kill his friend and ally Davian. Davian, whose ability to use kan exceeds even Caeden's, becomes trapped in the past, where he must learn how to build kan-powered machines in order to escape. Asha channels the enormous power of her Essence, magic deriving from her personal life force, to maintain the Boundary confining the horrors of the Darklands; the heavy price she pays is entombment within a virtual-reality bubble. Wirr, now Prince Torin the Northwarden, must rally his people to hold off armies of religious fanatics and Darklands monsters long enough for the others to succeed. So what do we have here, a thaumaturgical-alchemical extravaganza? A teenage superpower fantasy to rival Marvel comics? What with the unflagging pace, so many moving parts, and so much intricate, lavish, and sometimes intimidating detail, it's nigh impossible to ascertain whether it all adds up. What matters is the author's unshakable conviction that it does—a conviction that eventually we come to share, if only by osmosis. One intractable flaw: Though there are so many immortals running around, we don't feel the weight of all their years and deeds. It's more like time's collapsed into a dimensionless present.
Fascinating, and not for the faint of heart.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-27418-0
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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