Not a side-splitter this time, though broadly amusing and bubbling with wit and wisdom: both an excellent story and a...
Another Discworld yarn—#28 if you're counting (The Last Hero, 2001, etc.). Commander Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork's City Watch has it made: he's a duke, rich, respected, and his wife Sybil is about to give birth. But then Vimes is called away to deal with a notorious and ruthless murderer, Carcer, now trapped on the roof of the university library. Amid a furious storm, lightning and magic hurl Sam and Carcer 20 years back in time. Sam's younger self is a rookie Night Watch cop. History, and Sam's memory, tells that Sam learned his street smarts from a skillful, straight-arrow cop named John Keel. But Carcer's arrived in the past, too—and he's murdered Keel. In the same fight (coincidentally?), Sam received an injury he remembers Keel having. Must he somehow impersonate Keel, and teach young Sam how to survive? What will the History Monks—the holy men who ensure that what's supposed to happen, happens—do? Adding further complications, Sam knows that the current ruler of the city, Lord Winder, is both mad and utterly corrupt: revolution's a-brewing, with riots, street barricades, cavalry charges, and thousands dead. And the horrid Unmentionables, Winder's secret torturers and jailers, must be curbed—especially when Carcer turns up in charge of them.
Not a side-splitter this time, though broadly amusing and bubbling with wit and wisdom: both an excellent story and a tribute to beat cops everywhere, doing their hair-raising jobs with quiet courage and determination.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-001311-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
As in Resurrection (1966) and The Wreckage of Agathon (1970) Gardner demonstrates his agility at juggling metaphysical notions while telling a diverting tale. Here he has used as a means of discovering man's unsavory ways that muzziest of monsters, Grendel, from the Beowulf chronicle. As in the original, Grendel is a bewildering combination of amorphous threats and grisly specifics — he bellows in the wilds and crunches through hapless inhabitants of the meadhall. But Grendel, the essence of primal violence, is also a learning creature. Itc listens to a wheezing bore with scales and coils, a pedantic Lucifer, declaim on the relentless complexity of cosmic accident. He hears an old priest put in a word for God as unity of discords, where nothing is lost. And Grendel continues to observe the illusions of bards, kings, heroes, and soldiers, occasionally eating one. After the true hero arrives sprouting fiery wings, to deal the death blow, he shows Grendel the reality of both destruction and rebirth. Throughout the trackless philosophic speculation, the dialogue is witty and often has a highly contemporary tilt: "The whole shit-ass scene was his idea, not mine," says Grendel, disgusted by a sacrificial hero. At the close one is not sure if the savior is "blithe of his deed," but Gardner, the word-pleaser, should be.
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1971
ISBN: 0679723110
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1971
A smart and knotty merger of horror, fantasy, and realism.
A tragedy thrusts a mourning father into peculiar, otherworldly corners of New York City.
When Apollo and Emma have their baby, Brian, it feels like both reward and challenge for the new dad. Apollo, the son of a single mother, had been scraping by as a bookseller who hunts estate and garage sales for rare first editions, so even the unusual circumstance of Brian's birth (in a stalled subway train) seems like a blessing, as does the way Apollo stumbles across a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird (inscribed by Harper Lee to Truman Capote, no less) shortly after. But after some young-parent squabbles and inexplicable images on their smartphones foreshadow trouble, the story turns nightmarish: Apollo finds himself tied up and beaten by Emma, then forced to listen to the sounds of Brian’s murder. LaValle has a knack for blending social realism with genre tropes (The Ballad of Black Tom, 2012, etc.), and this blend of horror story and fatherhood fable is surprising and admirably controlled. Though the plot is labyrinthine, it ultimately connects that first edition (“It’s just a story about a good father, right?”), Emma’s motivations, and the fate of their son, with enough room to contemplate everyday racism, the perils of personal technology, and the bookselling business as well. Built on brief, punchy chapters, the novel frames Apollo’s travels as a New York adventure tale, taking him from the basements of the Bronx to a small island in the East River that’s become a haven for misfit families to a seemingly sleepy neighborhood in Queens that’s the center of the story’s malevolence. But though the narrative takes Apollo to “magical places, where the rules of the world are different,” he’s fully absorbed the notion that fairy tales are manifestations of our deepest real-world anxieties. In that regard, LaValle has successfully delivered a tale of wonder and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be a parent.
A smart and knotty merger of horror, fantasy, and realism.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9594-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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