Ingenious and mystical, although readers familiar with fantasy and science fiction will find little new or provocative here....
Moving far from the milieu of Easy Rawlins and Socrates Fortlow (Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, 1997, etc.), Mosley offers two novellas in one volume, part of a series entitled Crosstown to Oblivion, the common theme being, "a black man destroys the world."
In The Gift of Fire, the Titan Prometheus escapes from the bondage and torture imposed on him by the Olympians for bringing mankind the gift of fire and alights in present-day Los Angeles, intent on bringing humans a second gift: that of enlightenment, so they can free themselves from unwitting slavery at the hands of those selfsame Olympians. But so spiritually impoverished is the modern age that Prometheus finds he cannot bestow his gift without killing the recipients or driving them insane. Finally he comes upon a physically helpless black boy, Chief Reddy, who fantasizes about being a superhero and saving the father he never knew from the forces of doom. What happens next will come as no surprise to fans of Robert A. Heinlein's classic Stranger in a Strange Land. Flip the book, and read again from the front, like the old Ace doubles, to encounter On the Head of a Pin, where Joshua Winterland works as a documenter at a company designing a fiber-optic tapestry, the Sail, intended for advanced animatronics editing techniques. But to everybody's surprise, the Sail turns out to be something quite different: a window into alternate worlds and times. Joshua finds he’s particularly attuned to the device and soon contacts beautiful Thalla of the Alto, a future race created by humans and perpetually threatened by a remnant humanity guided by a huge computer. Complications ensue when the government gets wind of the device.
Ingenious and mystical, although readers familiar with fantasy and science fiction will find little new or provocative here. Fans of Mosley's gumshoe noir books (or Blue Light, 1998, his earlier foray into the domain) will certainly wish to investigate.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3008-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sure, it’s kind of a rip-off, but it’s scary, it’s fun, and it’s one hell of a carnival ride.
Comedy duo and YouTube superstars McLaughlin and Neal (Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality, 2017) craft a novel about things that go bump in the night.
Stranger Things carries a lot of cultural weight by itself these days—the legacy of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and the many weird movies and books that don’t get the credit they deserve—but these comedy writers have hit that vein hard with this VHS-era kicker that references the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Kickboxer on the very first page. This is Bleak Creek, North Carolina, circa the early 1990s. We have three buddies, natch: Rex McClendon, whose dad owns a funeral home; his bestie, Lief Nelson; and their mutual crush, Alicia Boykins. They’re making PolterDog, an indie movie, because why not? Anyone who grew up in this era will be delighted by all the pop-culture references, from Goodfellas to Smokey and the Bandit. Of course, we need some reasonable adults around to help, too, so we get Janine Blitstein, a filmmaker just graduated from NYU film school, and her cousin Donna Lowe. Things get creepy in a hurry when Alicia is banished because of “bad behavior” to a local private school called Whitewood, founded in 1979. The big bad here is Wayne Whitewood, head of the school where every student is robbed of an identity and known only as “Candidatus”—Whitewood is the so-named “Keeper,” assisted by the Nurse Ratched–esque “Helper.” All the students are threatened at every turn by torture, most commonly “The Roll,” in which they’re confined in a carpet for days on end. Of course, there's a rescue mission, but because we’re in that Stephen King territory, there are also a bunch of supernatural threats, including a cursed spring and something known only as “The One Below.”
Sure, it’s kind of a rip-off, but it’s scary, it’s fun, and it’s one hell of a carnival ride.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984822-13-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
A medieval fable of obscure moral import blossoms into a thoughtful, emotionally complex, absorbing drama that stands...
From the author of Uprooted (2015), the splendid Temeraire Napoleonic Wars–and-dragons series, etc., this reworked fairy tale’s opening sentence might well have read Once upon a time in Old Lithuania....
Expanding a recent short story based on “Rumpelstiltskin,” Novik weaves in other elements of Eastern European folklore along with some fine original flourishes. Miryem, the granddaughter of affluent Jewish moneylenders, takes over her incompetent father’s failing business affairs. Channeling anger and frustration into business acumen, she collects the debts that are owed, accepting goods or services as well as coin. In this and other ways, Miryem turns copper and silver into gold. Unfortunately, gold attracts the attention of the Staryk, coldhearted fairies who occasionally intrude into the human world, bringing with them forgetfulness and a breath of winter. One such gives Miryem fairy silver, ordering her to change it into gold. Fairy silver, Miryem finds, is so beautiful that it fetches huge sums in gold, especially when made into jewelry magnificent enough to intrigue the Duke. Miryem slowly grasps that she’s made a bargain with the Staryk: He will make her his queen if she succeeds in spinning a vast pile of silver into gold—and freeze her solid if she fails. She has no wish to marry him but also notices that the Staryk do not particularly value gold in itself—so why do they want such large quantities of it? In spare prose of great clarity Novik weaves in and out of multiple first-person narratives in sometimes-illuminating, sometimes-disconcerting or confusing ways, exploring human and alien social structures and ethnic prejudices, fathers and daughters, damaged relationships and hidden agendas, wringing unexpected consequences from seemingly simple choices.
A medieval fable of obscure moral import blossoms into a thoughtful, emotionally complex, absorbing drama that stands confidently on its own merits.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-18098-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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