A deceptively mild tale about a walled city that turns overtly scary before it’s over.
A man traveling the country comes across a religious commune that’s easy to enter but decidedly more difficult to leave in this debut thriller.
Feeling trapped in Florida, John leaves his girlfriend behind and hitchhikes north. He meets gas-station owner Jerry in West Virginia and plans to stick around for a bit of fishing. John’s also curious about a nearby walled city. Jerry, who says nothing about being a former resident, recommends the traveler stay away, but John can’t help himself. A gatekeeper answers his knock and lets him into Abestown, which houses an apparent sect. Residents are immediately wary of the Outsider, standing out in his loud, bright clothes and sporting an unruly ponytail and beard. But there’s definitely something strange going on: when John asks about the unmistakable train whistle, everyone tells him there’s no train or even a whistling that he repeatedly hears. Commune leader and Head Historian Rob Kai wants the townsfolk to remain devout, and even questioning the law could spark a trial most likely resulting in a punishment by death. Rob fears that John, as a representative of “the evils of the outside world,” may be infecting the people, who could, for starters, decide that they, too, hear the sound of a train. The methodical Head Historian debates evicting the Outsider—or simply killing him. Suspense in the novel initially feels muted since it’s unclear if John’s in any danger. But an unnerving atmosphere slowly creeps in. The religion, for one, is weirdly ambiguous, a Christian faith that simultaneously idolizes founder Abe and things done or said “as would please Abe.” Similarly, there are the necrolilith, an evil presence in the surrounding woods, as well as the disturbing manner in which the Council of Historians carries out a death penalty. All this menace eventually becomes more chilling as the story progresses, with Huguenin revealing some of Abestown’s inner workings and a hint of Jerry’s back story. A somewhat open ending retains an overall sense of dread, leaving a character or two’s fate in question and not expounding on Rob’s largely hidden—and frankly terrifying—ability.
A deceptively mild tale about a walled city that turns overtly scary before it’s over.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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