A creepy and entertaining tale about a misbegotten quest to cheat death.
Two men vie for the job of detecting people who’ve been buried alive in Frank’s gonzo fantasy tale.
This yarn unfolds in a vaguely Eastern European village where a Grave Listener named Volushka plies his trade: camping out next to fresh graves and listening, by way of a tube poked into a buried coffin, for sounds that indicate that an apparently deceased person has revived. Volushka spends solitary, uneventful days boozing and sleeping in the cemetery, but at night he must fend off the ghosts, witches, and vampires who frequent the area. He’s also vehemently disliked by the local villagers. He’s a large, imposing man with a room-emptying odor and a propensity for nasty jibes: “was she prone to lunatic, farting rampages?” he queries a bereaved family. He’s also regularly beaten by everyone from a brothel proprietor to an old woman at a well to a 5-year-old boy named Benzi with whom he endlessly trades juvenile barbs. Volushka’s life is disrupted when a stranger named Marcabrusa appears and decides to take over his cushy gig. Swayed by the new arrival’s silver tongue, the townsfolk beat Volushka unconscious and give the listening job to Marcabrusa, who promptly unearths nine buried-alive villagers felled by a mysterious epidemic. Volushka repairs to the swampy lair of the Witch of Gore Mal Gore and, after a horrifying sexual encounter, obtains a magic powder that temporarily makes a person appear to be dead. He then hatches a plot to stage a listening showdown between himself and Marcabrusa over the graves of two twin girls.
Frank’s novel has the grotesquerie of a Tim Burton movie, the droll corruption of a Mark Twain story (camouflaged by pompous oratory), and the cheerful brutality of a Punch and Judy show. The characters have few redeeming qualities; Volushka is a loathsome tangle of grandiosity, cowardice, and hypocrisy; he has a conniving intellect, but is also profoundly stupid. However, he’s humanized by his inability to dissemble and scheme just as well as his adversaries. The narrative is certainly over the top, but Frank manages to mine comedic gold in scenes that combine verbal fireworks with clever slapstick. In one hilarious bit, Volushka and Benzi are forced to translate their usual screaming match into silent pantomime beside the bed of two slumbering villagers. For all its farcical elements, the novel also gets at themes of belonging, loneliness, and the paranoia of small, insular groups panicked by superstition and sudden disaster. Frank’s prose is elegant and vivid, but the more pungent details are always at the service of character and meaning, as in a sketch of the witch, who likes Volushka’s looks: “The form of a body slowly emerged from a flickering mist, surrounded by a poisonous corona. A croaking, ancient, hollow voice pulled itself out of a raspy echo and shivered in its loneliness, wroth and infernal grief. ‘You’re a plump one.’ ” The result is an inventive, mordantly funny story with a blighted but yearning soul.
A creepy and entertaining tale about a misbegotten quest to cheat death.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9798987782408
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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