An accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author.
A Texas family that runs a haunted house is haunted by monsters for decades.
This ambitious, grotesque debut novel is a love letter to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, so it may not be the easiest horror novel to parse or explain. That said, this is a very scary coming-of-age tale that lives in the same space as Stranger Things, Stand By Me, and Stephen King’s It (1986). The story is told by Noah Turner, who matter-of-factly recounts the dark and terrible fortunes of his family. He opens with the sweet romance between his parents, Harry and Margaret, who marry and start a comic book store and a haunted house called The Wandering Dark in the small town of Vandergriff, Texas. But terrible things keep happening, including Harry’s untimely death, Margaret’s bottomless grief, the sudden disappearance of Noah’s oldest sister, Sydney, and his sister Eunice’s crippling mental illness, not to mention the increasingly frequent disappearances of children from Vandergriff. These events would be frightening by themselves, but Hamill adds another layer by introducing a huge supernatural creature that turns up on Noah’s doorstep one night and declares it's his friend while giving him a few magical powers to boot. But things like giant monsters always turn out to be something...else, and in Noah’s adolescence, this one does, too. The way Hamill weaves his way between the phantasmagorical elements and Noah’s everyday dramas is nimble in a way reminiscent of King, who practically invented this narrative style. Creepy interstitial entries dubbed “The Turner Sequences” flesh out the fates of Noah’s family. Eventually, an older Noah meets a group of people calling themselves The Fellowship who can also see these monsters, and Noah’s instinct is to run as far away as possible. But darkness unleashed can never really be escaped, and readers are bound to find themselves shuddering at the novel's lurid denouement.
An accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4767-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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