An inventive but baffling literary experiment that makes just as much sense as the end of Twin Peaks.
In a near-future Seattle undergoing a slow apocalypse, a writer is convinced to undertake a heroic mission to save the city by rewriting its history.
For some time now, poet and essayist Scanlon (Border Run, 2013, etc.) has been curating The Twin Peaks Project, which invites writers to portray their experiences with the early-1990s television show through personal essays, criticism, poetry, etc., which are then published on a variety of websites. Here, he combines a portrayal of a post-apocalyptic American Northwest similar to that in his novel Forecast (2012) with aspects of the television show in a long, rambling thriller that seems more interested in its own metafictional nature than in telling a proper story. The book’s narrator is Blake Williams, the author of a bestselling book (also called Forecast) who's moved back to Seattle to care for his dying mother. His wife, confusingly also named Blake, has long since left him, and neighbors are moving out of the city to escape some dire circumstances that are hinted at but not explained. Eventually, Blake is recruited by an underground group, The Guild of St. Cooper, which wants him to change the city’s fate by writing a version of its history in which Dale Cooper, the fictional FBI agent in Twin Peaks, saves the day. There is a conspiracy Blake must unravel, but it’s obscenely complicated and unbelievable. If you dig this exchange between Cooper and Blake, this is the story for you: “It was you who discovered what Weyerhaeuser was up to with our extraterrestrial visitors, and you whose first experience with transpositional epiphany led us to the discovery of Existencelastic Macrobial Foreshortening,” says Cooper. Everyone else merely needs to know that it’s pretty weird and includes aliens and mind control and Dale Cooper–isms and flashbacks and ruminations on the nature of writing.
An inventive but baffling literary experiment that makes just as much sense as the end of Twin Peaks.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-936873-61-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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