A first-rate work that intrigues and entertains.
Financial and psychological problems send a writer on an unusual odyssey in this exceptional debut.
Here’s a first novel by a published poet about an American in Europe having trouble completing a writing project—echoes of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. Maybe more poets should write novels, for, like Lerner, Brewer has crafted a good one. His unnamed narrator is a painter by training who finds surprising success with a story collection and lands a big advance for a first novel. It doesn’t go well. He has been coping for some 20 years with suicidal depression, which visits him as something he calls the Mist and now saps what little faith he has in his writing. When his deadline arrives, he has managed to spend the advance without producing a page. He’s sort of saved by a ghostwriting gig for a physicist that will work down the narrator’s debt to his publisher. Then the physicist disappears, which is where Brewer’s mostly flashback novel begins, with the narrator in Italy on a train known as “the red arrow,” bound for the town where he hopes to find the missing man. While traveling, he visits many memories: of painting, of a chemical spill in his West Virginia hometown, of the smart, supportive woman he married, of an ailing friend’s suggestion for therapy. And always there is the Mist, oppressing him and—somewhat, unavoidably—the narrative. From the first page, the narrator teases with allusions to a “treatment” he has had that he’ll explain later, “because if I do so now, I’ll lose you.” The therapy is certainly unusual and is bound up with coincidences and confluences that touch on the physicist, theories of time, and references to W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, Geoff Dyer’s book on D.H. Lawrence, and Michael Pollan’s on changing your mind.
A first-rate work that intrigues and entertains.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32012-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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