Narrated by a cybercentury Wife of Bath, this bawdy tale suspends both our disbelief and our scruples.
While recovering from breast cancer, a woman takes a job as a teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in an isolated Australian town, where she is beset by both inner and outer demons.
Eleanor Mellett is in her early 30s, recently single, and in recovery from cancer treatments that have culminated in a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. A support group misfit, Eleanor begins to keep a private blog as a therapeutic gesture. It is through this device that Eleanor’s “funny-angry” voice, the unchallenged star of this unconventional novel, dictates the reader’s experience of the plot. In short order, Eleanor moves to remote Talbingo to replace the angelic Miss Barker (who's disappeared), becomes involved with the erotically gifted vacuum salesman Gregory and his lumpen teenage brother, Ryan, and runs afoul of the small-town sensibilities of a host of characters, from the school’s ferocious front-office maven, Glenda, to the exorcism-happy Friar. Throw in an ominous “1960s sci-fi power station, like some kind of reinforced bunker where Dr. Evil might live,” a vengeful, reanimated hand, and the potentially sentient soul-transport bus of the title, and the results may seem like a hyperbolic decoupage of B-movie reference, each layer complicating and confusing the one before. What saves this book from the threat of murk, however, is movie director and writer Barrett’s (Rush Oh!, 2016) skillful deployment of the form. Eleanor’s voice is bold, frank, and savagely funny. Her observations about the intersections of cancer culture and the rom-com ideology of a certain kind of 21st-century feminism are so keen as to draw blood. Moreover, the total-eclipse–level narcissism of this personal-blog style neatly conceals how unreliable Eleanor’s perspective actually becomes. Readers will find themselves going to great lengths to excuse some of her more dubious behaviors—including, but not limited to: assault, breaking and entering, and potentially maiming the Friar. Eleanor begins her blog by stumbling through a world of familiar absurdity and ends it by stumbling out of a world whose absurdity has become frenetically surreal. The journey from here to there shows the alert reader a tremendous amount about both the rigidity of our social mores and the flexibility of our sympathies.
Narrated by a cybercentury Wife of Bath, this bawdy tale suspends both our disbelief and our scruples.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-11044-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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