Chapter three of King's epic alternate-world saga (1988, 1989) finds Roland the Gunslinger and his sidekicks continuing their quest for the Dark Tower—and the Maine master keyboarding some of his least restrained writing in years, great sagging storm clouds of padded prose that only occasionally thunder or brighten with lightning inspiration. The storyline by now is so complex that King opens with a four-page "Argument" summing up past action and tracing ties between major characters. The Argument for volume four won't be much longer, since relatively little happens here: Roland trains Eddie Dean and Susannah Walker, previously brought by him from Manhattan to his blighted world, in the arts of gunslinging—soon used to slay a giant mechanical bear named Shardik; Jake, the boy whom Roland let die in volume one, reappears as a Gotham schoolkid who makes his way through a haunted house into Roland's world; the band of four encounter a town of old folks, then a wasted city where Jake is kidnapped by degenerates, then rescued; Roland and company take a ride toward the Dark Tower on a train operated by an insane computer enamored of riddles. In a note, King admits that "finding the doors to Roland's world has never been easy for me." The strain is evident, with the volume seemingly jerry-built on borrowings (the hoary haunted house; the mad computer, echoing Hal of 2001; the wasted city and its criminal denizens, shades of Escape from New York) and overblown character conflicts (can Eddie summon the courage to cross the swaying bridge?). Still, some of the action cooks up shivery suspense, and Roland's anticipated duel of riddles with the homicidal computer promises a swift start to the next volume. Hopefully it won't take any more slack interlude volumes for Roland to reach the Dark Tower. Meanwhile, though confirmed series fans might at least tolerate this chapter (and buy up its 1.5 million first printing—on-sale Dec. 2), the generic King fan will enjoy far more the upcoming Needful Things (p. 813).
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-452-26740-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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