A chilling, desolate short-story collection with rare splinters of light.
Whitley’s nine stories are rife with raging violence, revenge, and shady characters.
This collection’s grim, malevolent tone is set with the opening story, “Bear Trap,” about a man who, after miraculously walking away unscathed from the six gunshots his girlfriend blasted at him, goes to desperate lengths to score heroin. Death is a recurring theme throughout, as is a callous attitude toward it. In “A Reasonable Amount of Trouble,” when a man named Cutter gets shot in a motel room fiasco involving a meth shipment and cash and later dies, his criminal partner, Grisly, stares “placidly at Cutter’s corpse who is gawking, jaw broken of hinges, at the ceiling with something of profound curiosity.” In one of the shortest pieces, “Company of Awful,” a woman’s father, who has contracted rabies from her dog, is shot and killed by her boyfriend, who then enlists her amphetamine-seeking drug-addict ex to help chop the man’s body up (which is already “partially butchered” by a machete) in exchange for drug money. Turning his lens to a murky bar scene in “The Chainthrower,” the author evocatively writes of “whores making their appointed rounds, holding cigarettes like little wands,” and describes an energy shift (“electrically charged, like the standing of hair before the strike of lightning”) moments before a vicious brawl breaks out. Whitley has a knack for crafting gritty, sharp-edged scenes with clipped sentences that spike the tension and capture the frenetic, unstable characters on the fringes of society. However, the stories lack variety and suffer from a general anticlimactic aimlessness as the characters, for the most part, remain stuck in the same ruts they started in. A prevailing sense of emotional disconnection makes it challenging, even for readers with a soft spot for unlikeable, morally corrupt characters, to invest in the stories, and that may be the biggest issue here.
A chilling, desolate short-story collection with rare splinters of light.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: LEFTOVER Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A grim yet gleefully gratifying tale of lost innocence and found family.
A woman fears she made a fatal mistake by taking in a blood-soaked tween during a storm.
High winds and torrential rain are forecast for “The Middle of Nowhere, New Hampshire,” making Casey question the structural integrity of her ramshackle rental cabin. Still, she’s loath to seek shelter with her lecherous landlord or her paternalistic neighbor, so instead she just crosses her fingers, gathers some candles, and hopes for the best. Casey is cooking dinner when she notices a light in her shed. She grabs her gun and investigates, only to find a rail-thin girl hiding in the corner under a blanket. She’s clutching a knife with “Eleanor” written on the handle in black marker, and though her clothes are bloody, she appears uninjured. The weather is rapidly worsening, so before she can second-guess herself, former Boston-area teacher Casey invites the girl—whom she judges to be 12 or 13—inside to eat and get warm. A wary but starving Eleanor accepts in exchange for Casey promising not to call the police—a deal Casey comes to regret after the phones go down, the power goes out, and her hostile, sullen guest drops something that’s a big surprise. Meanwhile, in interspersed chapters labeled “Before,” middle-schooler Ella befriends fellow outcast Anton, who helps her endure life in Medford, Massachusetts, with her abusive, neglectful hoarder of a mother. As per her usual, McFadden lulls readers using a seemingly straightforward thriller setup before launching headlong into a series of progressively seismic (and increasingly bonkers) plot twists. The visceral first-person, present-tense narrative alternates perspectives, fostering tension and immediacy while establishing character and engendering empathy. Ella and Anton’s relationship particularly shines, its heartrending authenticity counterbalancing some of the story’s soapier turns.
A grim yet gleefully gratifying tale of lost innocence and found family.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781464260919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Fast-moving and disturbingly plausible.
Robots may be the future of warfare in this final father-son DeMille collaboration.
In Camp Hayden, Army Maj. Roger Ames is found dead, his skull crushed. Chief Warrant Officers Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor, special agents of the United States Army Criminal Investigation Division, are sent to the Mojave Desert, “a.k.a. in the middle of nowhere,” to investigate. In this fictional military installation, Army Rangers conduct field training exercises with lethal autonomous weapons. These “dangerous new toys,” nicknamed “tin men,” may become the future of warfare if they can be programmed to distinguish between friend and foe. Anyway, the Rangers’ job is to train the tin men, not the other way around. They are AI-driven robotic prototypes called D-17s, but even prototypes can kill. Did a bot kill the major? And was there criminal liability or intent, or was it a tragic accident? Brodie and Taylor discover that not everyone loves these beasts, and they must find out if humans are programming them for mischief or even trying to set up the program for failure. Meanwhile, the bots have nicknames. Bot number 20 is Bucky, seen on a video as a “seven-foot-tall titanium machine with hands covered in blood and brain matter” that has “a face but no eyes, with hands but no skin, with a body but no soul.” As scary as these beasties are, Brodie and Taylor must also look at the humans at Camp Hayden, because they learn that the “machines don’t have motives….They have inputs and outputs,” which naturally come from human programmers. They have neither brains nor courage nor honor; they do have brute force, speed, and agility. Obviously, plenty goes haywire in this enjoyable yarn. It feels a bit too believable for comfort, and that’s to the DeMilles’ credit as storytellers. Nelson DeMille had begun this project with his son Alex, who had to finish it alone after his father’s death.
Fast-moving and disturbingly plausible.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781501101878
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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