Commendable horror tales that confirm dread can be just as terrifying, if not more so, as whatever’s out there.
Sinister beings, human or otherwise, populate this collection of grim, disturbing stories.
The eponymous tale sets the book’s somber tone at the outset: 10-year-old intellectually disabled Emma McCann vanishes from her home in 1974. As in the stories that follow, there’s not only an ominous menace, but an overall hostility as well. Emma’s parents, for example, isolate their unwanted daughter, cared for by domestic servant Harriet Cartwright. The detective investigating the girl’s disappearance suspects her neglectful parents, but semiretired history professor John Durham has already spotted a pattern. Girls have disappeared every 17 years for nearly two centuries, meaning the abductor, or killer, may be something otherworldly. Similarly, in “The Lurker,” Courtney Sheffield’s tormented by Alvin Roach, whose deliberate encounters with her at their mutual workplace escalate into full-blown stalking. He winds up in prison, but his eventual escape sends Courtney into hiding at her sister’s cabin, terrified that he’ll somehow find her. The title character of “The Restlessness of Arvind Mehta” isn’t sure what he’s afraid of, burdened for years by a sense of unease—a feeling that something awful has either happened or will happen. A doctor for a correctional facility, he feels his anxiety may finally be explained when he meets Chester Dean Willits, an ailing serial killer on his deathbed and responsible for 47 murders. Lamb’s (The Fading, 2015) prose is terse and generally metaphor-free, an effective approach that tends to make the horror palpable. When Courtney, for instance, “can feel eyes upon her,” it’s most likely because someone’s actually watching her. “Motel 47” features a rare sign of humor, as Bob Gibson, driving through a severe storm, listens to radio tunes with titles echoing his dire predicament. But even that turns dark when Queen’s “Keep Yourself Alive” pops up. “The Reunion,” meanwhile, initially appears to be the least gloomy of the five stories: widower Bill Miller bumps into a childhood crush just before their upcoming 30-year high school reunion. But it takes a startling turn (or two), while stories with seemingly happy endings are overshadowed by a lingering threat—trepidation might not go away so easily after all.
Commendable horror tales that confirm dread can be just as terrifying, if not more so, as whatever’s out there.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5372-6296-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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