God is a stand-up comic. Jesus is a surly, ungrateful kid. Hell is "the ultimate inner city." And Stanley Elkin is still the most mordant, acrobatic phrasemaker around: his savage ironies rat-a-tat-tat through these three interrelated stories, all about death and religion (a freeform Judeo-Christian mix), and the lousy way God has arranged things. There's simply no justice—as Minneapolis liquor-store owner Ellerbee discovers when he's killed in a hold-up and finds himself in Hell after a brief glimpse of pearly Heaven. True, Ellerbee was generous, kind, and decent, but God ("Hi. . . . I'm the Lord. Hot enough for you?") gets him anyway on various technical infractions. After a few decades down Below, Ellerbee strikes up a chumship with a newcomer—one of the holdup men who killed him. . . and went on to a long, healthy life. And the third disgruntled resident of Elkin's Hell is a cemetery groundskeeper outraged to be struck down: "I take low-cal minerals, I'm strictly salt-free. I eat corrective lunch!" And so it goes, with Elkin toying fiendishly with religious myths, ideas about death, Bible stories, Dante, and all—culminating in God's explanations of Everything ("He explained why children suffered and showed them how to do the latest disco steps") and with the revelation that Goodness has nothing to do with the way history has been arranged. Why, then, is everything the way it is? "Because it makes a better story is why"—God's an artist in search of the perfect audience. If you have a feeling that all this irreverent stuff has been done before, you're mostly right—for example, there's Bruce Jay Friedman's play Steambath (with God as a Puerto Rican bath attendant). And Elkin can't resist easy jokes (that Woody Allen makes better), can't break some of his stylistic tics that have become self-parody, and can't put his fragments together in a way that really builds up a satisfying whole book. But his imagination is often a creepy marvel—especially in a voice-from-the-grave cemetery sequence—and his wordplay at its best is both thought-provoking and hilarious. Spotty, minor work, perhaps—but flash after flash of real brilliance.
Pub Date: June 12, 1979
ISBN: 1564783421
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1979
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.
In the first volume of a trilogy, a fresh cataclysm besets a physically unstable world whose ruling society oppresses its most magically powerful inhabitants.
The continent ironically known as the Stillness is riddled with fault lines and volcanoes and periodically suffers from Seasons, civilization-destroying tectonic catastrophes. It’s also occupied by a small population of orogenes, people with the ability to sense and manipulate thermal and kinetic energy. They can quiet earthquakes and quench volcanoes…but also touch them off. While they’re necessary, they’re also feared and frequently lynched. The “lucky” ones are recruited by the Fulcrum, where the brutal training hones their powers in the service of the Empire. The tragic trap of the orogene's life is told through three linked narratives (the link is obvious fairly quickly): Damaya, a fierce, ambitious girl new to the Fulcrum; Syenite, an angry young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and frighteningly powerful mentor and who stumbles across secrets her masters never intended her to know; and Essun, searching for the husband who murdered her young son and ran away with her daughter mere hours before a Season tore a fiery rift across the Stillness. Jemisin (The Shadowed Sun, 2012, etc.) is utterly unflinching; she tackles racial and social politics which have obvious echoes in our own world while chronicling the painfully intimate struggle between the desire to survive at all costs and the need to maintain one’s personal integrity. Beneath the story’s fantastic trappings are incredibly real people who undergo intense, sadly believable pain.
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-22929-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.
This debut novel, the first of a projected trilogy, blends science fiction, fantasy, gothic chiller, and classic house-party mystery.
Gideon Nav, a foundling of mysterious antecedents, was not so much adopted as indentured by the Ninth House, a nearly extinct noble necromantic house. Trained to fight, she wants nothing more than to leave the place where everyone despises her and join the Cohort, the imperial military. But after her most recent escape attempt fails, she finally gets the opportunity to depart the planet. The heir and secret ruler of the Ninth House, the ruthless and prodigiously talented bone adept Harrowhark Nonagesimus, chooses Gideon to serve her as cavalier primary, a sworn bodyguard and aide de camp, when the undying Emperor summons Harrow to compete for a position as a Lyctor, an elite, near-immortal adviser. The decaying Canaan House on the planet of the absent Emperor holds dark secrets and deadly puzzles as well as a cheerfully enigmatic priest who provides only scant details about the nature of the competition...and at least one person dedicated to brutally slaughtering the competitors. Unsure of how to mix with the necromancers and cavaliers from the other Houses, Gideon must decide whom among them she can trust—and her doubts include her own necromancer, Harrow, whom she’s loathed since childhood. This intriguing genre stew works surprisingly well. The limited locations and narrow focus mean that the author doesn’t really have to explain how people not directly attached to a necromantic House or the military actually conduct daily life in the Empire; hopefully future installments will open up the author’s creative universe a bit more. The most interesting aspect of the novel turns out to be the prickly but intimate relationship between Gideon and Harrow, bound together by what appears at first to be simple hatred. But the challenges of Canaan House expose other layers, beginning with a peculiar but compelling mutual loyalty and continuing on to other, more complex feelings, ties, and shared fraught experiences.
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31319-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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