The story of a man’s relatively sad life, but with enough preternatural occurrences to attract genre fans.
In Lamb’s debut supernatural drama, a man is plagued by recurring images and dreams of a ghost, a demon, or perhaps something else entirely.
Robert Schmidt’s life is, for the most part, normal. He became a wealthy man working for an oil field services company and fell in love with Sonia Muñoz García in Madrid, the two ultimately welcoming daughter Nora. But Robert is tormented by a burned boy he encountered while driving across country to his parents’ house. He suffered nightmares following the incident, but years later, while romancing Sonia, Robert again sees the boy, who this time threatens and chases him. The tortured man suspects the boy is a spirit or demonic being, but he also entertains ideas of schizophrenia or a repressed memory. Regardless, Robert can’t seem to erase him from his life, as the scarred boy repeatedly crops up no matter where Robert is. Despite shades of the supernatural, Lamb’s novel is more invested in telling Robert’s story as he woos Sonia. While he spends more and more time with Sonia, the impact of Robert’s initial confrontation with the boy gradually diminishes as the boy becomes merely a passing vision in his head. Later, more frequent appearances are unquestionably unnerving. In China, for instance, the boy is Chinese and speaking Cantonese; Robert reacts physically, but afterward, unsure whether the boy was real, he obsessively scours newspapers for an account of a Chinese boy being assaulted or killed. The ghost story plays like a subplot to Robert’s relationship with Sonia, though the couple’s yearslong romance tends to be depressing. Sonia can be cold, often denying or delaying sex and leaving Robert despondent. This leads to a weirdly formal partnership in which Robert asks permission prior to intimacy or even if he can be a part of their child’s life when Sonia decides to leave him (for a reason not wholly clear). Readers may be jolted by the drastic shift in the novel’s final act, which introduces a bevy of new characters. But those who stick around until the end will be rewarded with a smashing and gratifying conclusion that memorably explains what’s been going on.
The story of a man’s relatively sad life, but with enough preternatural occurrences to attract genre fans.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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