Suitable for fans of chaotic, surreal fiction.
The video of a Saint Bernard using a computer goes viral and brings a media circus to Peculiar, Missouri, in Wallace’s debut novel.
This story pokes fun at social media saturation, misplaced religious fervor, and the falseness of “reality” programming. Its narrator is retired doctor Ned Belton, who lives with his faithful canine companion, Samuel Langhorne “Clem” Clemens, as well as the memory of his beloved late wife, Mary. Every day, Ned walks to Brownie’s Cafe to meet three lifelong friends— Frank, Bill, and Skeeter—for a meal and a healthy dose of good-natured ribbing. Ned makes an off-the-cuff joke about his dog recommending an oil company’s stock, which is later misprinted in the newspaper. Skeeter uploads a video of Clem at a computer, which goes viral. When the oil stock skyrockets in price, the video captures the world’s attention and leads to the arrival of the novel’s two frightening antagonists: mentally unstable Securities and Exchange Commission Special Agent Norman McStone, who believes that Ned is guilty of insider training, and charismatic cult leader Father Jones, whose scandalous behavior includes sexual depravity and drug trafficking. As Bill remarks: “Ned, you are at the vortex of the confluence of a psychotic and a sociopath.” Wallace successfully conveys the sense of a small town under siege, and readers will feel the crush of the seemingly endless influx of obnoxious outsiders. Hysteria mounts as Father Jones whips his flock into a frenzy of worship centered on Clem: “An old woman started speaking in her version of tongues. She sounded like a Frenchman in a porno movie.” Ned’s friends spring into action and come to his assistance, devising an intricate plan to protect Clem from his followers, who, after all, are interfering with the hard-earned, if routine, pleasures of Ned’s retirement. Readers may be let down when the truth behind the viral video is finally revealed. Nevertheless, Wallace ends the novel with a nice touch, as a character that’s notably absent throughout the text appears at last to join the party of four at Brownie’s Cafe.
Suitable for fans of chaotic, surreal fiction.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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