A tale of a filmmaker trying to make it in Los Angeles, obscured by an incoherent structure and style.
A young man tries to make his dreams come true during a strange stay in California.
An onslaught of disconnected imagery emerges in this debut novel’s first few pages: a hooded figure by a bus cries, “How did I get here?” An old man asks the narrator to write his biography; the mysterious name “Monroe Doe” makes a first appearance; the narrator suddenly receives congratulations for graduating from primary school. After this somewhat surreal beginning, Eton develops a story about a young man graduating at the top of his class and leaving his home—Nigeria—to pursue his goal of breaking into the film industry. Soon he arrives in Los Angeles, where old friends help get him acclimated to the city. He seeks out an attorney who had once visited his home, and during this quest meets a character named Dr. Army. The narrator also hears the name Monroe Doe from an unknown voice. This enigmatic name quickly becomes connected with a woman he films at a wedding and with whom he falls madly in love. The narrator begins to question his path as his obsession for the woman leads to a charge of stalking; a tragic death also leaves him reeling. He finds solace in poetry before another smattering of disconnected images concludes the story, in particular, a man repeating over and over, “This is a dead end; you’re still in the maze.” While the chaos Eton presents can feel like an avant-garde interpretation of Los Angeles, the work remains too disjointed to support any solid interpretations. Sentences such as “The bishop...had chronicled a testimony of riding on flat tires for miles, I mean regular tires” occur so often that the simplest plot elements become lost. Readers never learn whose story this is, how the narrator overcame having no access to money on his arrival, or even how a major character died—leaving them to feel that they are the ones trapped in a confusing and frustrating maze.
A tale of a filmmaker trying to make it in Los Angeles, obscured by an incoherent structure and style.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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