A vivid, exciting and, on the whole, well-executed take on cyberpunk that measures up to the work done 15 years ago by the...
Nine linked stories that continue Mosley’s foray into science fiction that began in Blue Light (1998). Mystery fans eager for another outing with Easy Rawlins or Socrates Fortlow can find a version of Mosley's brand of socially stigmatized, African-American crime-solver in New York private detective Folio Johnson, a former bodyguard who nearly died saving his employer, the megalomaniacal MacroSoft Corp. head Dr. Ivan Kismet (owner of the world's richest, biggest corporation and head of a new religion that posits that God can be reached directly through technology), and was thus blessed by Dr. Kismet with a mechanical eye that can scan DNA and a chunk of computerized circuitry in his brain that links him with the Internet and every communications system in the dark, gritty, overwired, debauched mid-21st century. “Electric Eye,” the central story here, comes close to being a cyberpunk parody of the hard-boiled genre, in which its tired clichés–winning a fallen woman's love, waking up next to a freshly murdered corpse, etc.–are given a futuristic gloss. As cyberpunk godfather William Gibson did in Count Zero and Burning Chrome, Mosley uses stylish characters and technobabble to navigate an intricate, grimy, technologically baroque urban landscape where the struggles of exploited, marginalized, unusually gifted individuals, most of whom are racial, technological, or genetic hybrids like Folio, make significant—if occasionally unintended—changes in the repressive, vindictive, cruelly depersonalized world around them.
A vivid, exciting and, on the whole, well-executed take on cyberpunk that measures up to the work done 15 years ago by the Gibson and Bruce Sterling—but will Mosley’s mystery fans go for them?Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52954-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Featuring 21 charming illustrations by David Palladini, this is an adventure fantasy for young adults—or very old prepubescents—and among King's most accomplished works (though readers who groan at King's unremitting vulgarity in his adult novels will again have a few quarrels to pick). Prince Peter, 17, is the elder son of Roland, beer-drinking king of Delain who had managed to stay unwed until 50. Father Roland's not much for sex and manages it only about six times a year, with the aid of an aphrodisiac from court magician Flagg—despite the fact that his Queen Sasha was only 17 when he married her. Roland is renowned for having killed a dragon With his famed arrow Foe-Hammer and eaten its nine-chambered heart, which keeps his heroic aspect alive under his beer fat. After Sasha dies giving birth to their second son Thomas, the demonic magician Flagg, who is apparently 400 or more years old, desires chaos in the kingdom and fears that young Prince Peter, when crowned king, will bring good sense instead; and so Flagg wants the inferior, bumbling, manipulable second son Thomas to be king. With this aim in mind, he poisons King Roland with dragon sand, blames the murder on Peter and has him imprisoned in the 300-foot-tall prison called the Needle. The boy Thomas is crowned, but becomes a winebibber and beer. drinker and as round-gutted as his father. During his five years in the tower, Peter has his mother's fabulous doll-house to play with, but is secretly spinning an escape rope with threads from dinner napkins he weaves on the small doll-house loom. What Flagg does not know is that Thomas, hidden in a secret passage and looking into his father's room through the eyes of the stuffed dragon's head on the wall, saw Flagg give the king the poisoned wine. And so the time comes when Foe-Hammer must again be brought to bear on tho dragon. But which brother can actually slay Flagg? Some of King's smoothest writing and slickest effects, with the usual supercosmic horror scaled down to reasonably familiar villainy—though the sales, one assumes, will be supercosmic.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1986
ISBN: 0451166582
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986
An accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author.
A Texas family that runs a haunted house is haunted by monsters for decades.
This ambitious, grotesque debut novel is a love letter to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, so it may not be the easiest horror novel to parse or explain. That said, this is a very scary coming-of-age tale that lives in the same space as Stranger Things, Stand By Me, and Stephen King’s It (1986). The story is told by Noah Turner, who matter-of-factly recounts the dark and terrible fortunes of his family. He opens with the sweet romance between his parents, Harry and Margaret, who marry and start a comic book store and a haunted house called The Wandering Dark in the small town of Vandergriff, Texas. But terrible things keep happening, including Harry’s untimely death, Margaret’s bottomless grief, the sudden disappearance of Noah’s oldest sister, Sydney, and his sister Eunice’s crippling mental illness, not to mention the increasingly frequent disappearances of children from Vandergriff. These events would be frightening by themselves, but Hamill adds another layer by introducing a huge supernatural creature that turns up on Noah’s doorstep one night and declares it's his friend while giving him a few magical powers to boot. But things like giant monsters always turn out to be something...else, and in Noah’s adolescence, this one does, too. The way Hamill weaves his way between the phantasmagorical elements and Noah’s everyday dramas is nimble in a way reminiscent of King, who practically invented this narrative style. Creepy interstitial entries dubbed “The Turner Sequences” flesh out the fates of Noah’s family. Eventually, an older Noah meets a group of people calling themselves The Fellowship who can also see these monsters, and Noah’s instinct is to run as far away as possible. But darkness unleashed can never really be escaped, and readers are bound to find themselves shuddering at the novel's lurid denouement.
An accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4767-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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