Stewart’s debut is a collection of short horror stories from the Southern U.S., where ghosts, vampires and the darker side of humanity tend to reside.
Many of these stories can be labeled Southern gothic; most have a gloomy ambiance even when there’s no murder. Characters are unsettling, as with the titular bullied kid who isn’t bullied for long in “Timmy.” But Stewart, with an ample 56 stories, takes the time to examine other genres and does so with competence: There’s romance in “The Bright Side of the Moon,” in which an already-engaged man falls for the girl of his dreams; comedy in “I Write the Song,” with a dispute over songwriting credit that concludes hilariously; and a touch of the sci-fi in “Pally and the Quack,” one of the book’s best stories, in which a doctor in 1936 has a new device for combating cancer, with horribly detrimental effects. Although there are some contemporary settings, the majority of the tales take place in the mid-20th century, and Stewart incorporates the rampant racism and racial segregation of the time. The Southern flair never fluctuates, and the stories, in states such as Texas, Florida and Louisiana, are uniform; the warmer climate in the South, for example, seems inescapable, as the heat and humidity “bake the earth” and aren’t helped much by air conditioning. Likewise, first-person perspectives give the impressions of Southern locals telling stories to friends, almost like an urban legend. There’s the occasional vengeful spirit or creature, but the standouts in the collection often deal with evil found only in humans, including “The Lost Key,” about a young husband worried that a strange custodian has found his lost keys and will go after his wife, and “Six Clues to Marilyn Schaeffer,” in which cryptic notes may lead to a girl who’s been missing for 20 years. Each story has merit, and there aren’t any throwaways, but Stewart might have improved the book by cutting a few from the voluminous collection, perhaps to save for a later book. At this rate, maybe he already has 56 more lined up.
Quite a collection of dark gems; readers looking for somber tales with Southern flair need look no further.
Pub Date: May 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491730492
Page Count: 458
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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