A pleasing book for those who like to scare themselves silly, one to read with the lights on and the door bolted.
Two decades after his debut novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), Chbosky returns with a creepy horror yarn that would do Stephen King proud.
“Mom? Will he find us?” So asks young Christopher of his mother, Kate, who has spirited him away from her abusive mate and found a tiny town in Pennsylvania in which to hide out. Naturally, her secret is not safe—but it’s small potatoes compared to what Christopher begins to detect as he settles in to a new life and a new school. His friends, like him, are casualties, and that’s just fine for the malevolent forces that await out in the woods and even in the sky, the latter the place where Christopher comes into contact with a smiling, talking cloud that lures him off into the ever dark woods. “That’s when he heard a little kid crying,“ writes Chbosky, and that’s just about the time the reader will want to check to be sure that no one is hiding behind the chair—or worse, and about the scariest trope of all, which Chbosky naturally puts to work, under the bed. Christopher disappears only to turn up a little less than a week later, decidedly transformed. But then, so’s everyone in Mill Grove, including his elementary school teacher, who harbors an ominous thought: “Christopher was such a nice little boy. It was too bad that he was going to die now.” As things begin to go truly haywire, Chbosky’s prose begins to break down into fragments and odd punctuation and spelling, suggesting that someone other than the author is in control of the fraught world he’s depicting. One wonders why Kate doesn’t just fire up the station wagon and head down the Pennsylvania Turnpike rather than face things like a “hissing lady” and a townsman who has suddenly begun to sport daggerlike teeth, but that’s the nature of a good scary story—and this one is excellent.
A pleasing book for those who like to scare themselves silly, one to read with the lights on and the door bolted.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3133-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
It may be time for Silva's hero to retire from the field and let his protégés take over.
Gabriel Allon partners with a dubious ally in the Middle East.
When a 12-year-old is abducted from an exclusive private school in Geneva, Allon, head of Israeli intelligence, is among the first to know. The girl’s father is Khalid bin Mohammed, heir to the Saudi throne, and he wants Allon’s help. KBM was once feted as a reformer, ready to bring new industries and new freedoms to his country. When he makes his appeal to Allon, though, KBM is the prime suspect in the murder of a journalist. If KBM immediately makes you think of MBS, you are correct. Silva mentions Mohammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s real-life heir apparent, in a foreword. But anyone who recognizes KBM as a fictional echo of MBS might find this book to be more old news than fresh entertainment. In his last few novels, Silva has turned his attention to current world affairs, such as the rise of the new Russia and the threats of global terrorism. In novels like The Other Woman (2018) and House of Spies (2017), the author was inventive enough that these works felt compelling and original. And, in The Black Widow (2016), Silva wrote much of the story from the point of view of the French-born Israeli doctor Allon recruited for an undercover mission while also expanding the roles of a few familiar secondary characters. Allon is a wonderful creation. In the first several novels in this series, he posed as an art restorer while working for Israel’s intelligence service. He adopted a variety of personas and gave readers access to people and places few of us will ever see. Now that he’s a public figure who can no longer invent alter egos, his world is smaller and less fascinating. The pacing here is slow, and any sense of urgency is undercut by the matter of what’s at stake. Ultimately, this is a narrative about removing one horrible Saudi ruler in order to reinstate a less horrible Saudi ruler. This might be solid realpolitik, but it’s not terribly compelling fiction.
It may be time for Silva's hero to retire from the field and let his protégés take over.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283483-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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