A wistful, emotional roller coaster that finds worse than memories waiting at home.
The surviving members of a powerful teenage coven of magicians reunite in East Texas.
Much like Hamill’s debut, A Cosmology of Monsters (2019), this meaty horror novel is a treat for readers whose nostalgia gravitates to the likes of Stand by Me, Twin Peaks, or, most thematically, Stephen King’s It. In a similar vein to Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black novels or Stephen Graham Jones’ Indian Lake trilogy, Hamill takes some ordinary young people and puts them through the metaphysical wringer to see what’s left at the end. In Clegg, Texas, circa the late 1990s, we meet best pals Hal, Athena, and Erin. Their chance encounter with a lost boy in the woods leads them to classmate Peter and his grandfather, Professor Elijah Marsh, an eccentric practitioner of the titular magic who teaches them the ropes. “This power, this energy, this Dissonance?” explains the professor. “It’s born from discomfort. From unhappiness. From pain. This world we occupy, and which we hope to control, is a broken, violent place.” Grappling with forces they don’t really understand leads to a disaster that claims many lives, including one of their own. Unfortunately, our heroes aren’t in great shape two decades later. Erin is a barista going nowhere, Athena parlayed her magical talents into running an occult bookstore, and recovering alcoholic Hal is on his way to prison for murder. When an invitation to a 20th-anniversary memorial service arrives, no one wants to revisit the scene of the crime. But after a well-meaning closeted teen named Owen botches a necromancy spell and finds himself playing Renfield to a bad actor, they’re forced to reunite not just to confront their past but employ all their collective gifts to save the world. The rules governing Hamill’s fantastical universe can be a little hazy, but when the nightmare-fraught tale is filled with monsters, teleportation, time travel, and other supernatural wonders, it’s more fun to embrace the chaos.
A wistful, emotional roller coaster that finds worse than memories waiting at home.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593317259
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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