A terrific voice and premise, but ultimately the storyteller outshines the story.
In a small New England town, a developer attempting to build a residential community in a forest clearing begins to notice and experience strange happenings in the surrounding woods.
Martin Blaskett, the man at the center of Himmer’s (Fram, 2015, etc.) eerie fable, has abandoned city life for a trailer on his construction site, where he intends to build the sort of “ballgames and barbecues” neighborhood that he’s never lived in himself. (He hopes to settle there, too, and maybe one day start a family.) Things go south quickly, however: Martin gets lost in the woods and a bear attacks him; the town drunk disappears, and when Martin and his neighbor, an old hunter named Gil, go to the man’s house to investigate, it appears an animal has ransacked the place; another key character goes missing. Could all of this have something to do with the shape-shifter the townspeople call Scratch who, according to local legend, roams the woods in various forms and can never die? Himmer’s boldest choice is to make this otherworldly force his narrator. Inhabiting the body of a coyote, Scratch sometimes speaks directly to readers, inviting them at the novel's start to transform into coyotes, too (“you’ll keep up more easily on faster legs than your own”). The writing is magnificently inventive throughout: at one point the shape-shifter offers the entire history of the woods near Martin's land in mere paragraphs. For a novel with so much going on, however, the pacing can, at times, feel slow. Himmer gives too much space to back story and dream sequences, making readers itchy to return to the here and now, and with the exception of the lovingly rendered Gil, none of the characters pop with nearly the force of the unconventional narrator at the novel’s core.
A terrific voice and premise, but ultimately the storyteller outshines the story.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 9781940430843
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Dark House
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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