Harris’ debut novel presents an intriguing take on time travel, as a man in a coma travels back to 1965, inhabiting the body of an American soldier in the midst of the Vietnam War.
It’s 1995, and Sam Michael, who never served in Vietnam but is haunted by horrible dreams of it, has a brother, James, who’s still missing in action. The night of Sam’s 50th birthday party, John Strawder, who served the same time as James, tells Sam a bizarre story about a battle in which a black soldier named Will Lee Waters told him details about his past and future that Waters couldn’t possibly know. Wounded, Strawder was rescued by a strange Air Force colonel named Gabriel. The night of the party, Sam is struck by a car and falls into a coma. The dreams begin as usual, but he plunges ever deeper, finally awakening to reality as Waters in 1965 Vietnam. There, he begins a search for his missing brother. Meanwhile, readers learn that his brother was recruited into a highly secret undercover operation, where he goes by the name Jack Gabriel. While the unique plot is a solid page-turner with vividly written action scenes, most of the writing needs tightening and is filled with annoying lists of questions characters constantly ask themselves. “Why is fate treating me like this? Why have I been brought so close to James more than once, but could not reach him? How will I ever find out what really happened to my brother?” Additionally, Harris ascribes the dreams to an incubus, traditionally a male demon who sexually attacks female sleepers. But this minor confusion of incubi and succubi (the female equivalent) is rendered moot, since, far from being demonic, Sam’s journey to find James becomes a spiritual quest that some characters even deem to be ordained by God. Still, the well-crafted story will appeal to fans of sci-fi and military drama.
A creative, suspenseful time-travel tale laced with historical detail from the Vietnam era.
Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491716915
Page Count: 306
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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