A thriller that ably rakes through werewolf tropes in search of new territory.
From the author of The Whaler Fortune (2014) comes a Victorian supernatural thriller about a good man coping with a science-born curse.
In London 1841, Dr. Moyer Phillips keeps a ferocious black wolf captive in his lab. As a member of the scholarly—and secret—Golden Serpent Society, the doctor dedicates his studies to controlling mental illness. His test subject is a wolf primarily because, like humans, the species maintains a social hierarchy. “Chemically, I have introduced a controlled insanity,” he tells his colleagues. One night, Phillips finds his wolf prone and unresponsive, so he examines the animal—and is bitten. Meanwhile, Cecil Griffiths arrives in Ramsbury Barlow, outside London, to find work and living arrangements. He’s taken on by the Breggins estate, where he befriends fellow worker Burney and a boy named Davey. Cecil makes even better connections through the church, including the Windham family: Graham, Cynthia, and their daughter, Marie. He’s invited to dinner on their sprawling farm, but the night is interrupted by the attack of a humanoid wolf. During the ensuing carnage, Cecil is wounded by the creature, and he later finds that his hearing and other senses have sharpened. As grisly murders begin seizing London, Cecil struggles to find the good in each day. Author Michael imbues his thriller with a trenchant darkness reminiscent of Poe and Lovecraft: “The God of this world,” Cecil tells Burney, “is not concerned with the affairs of man.” Michael’s flair for gory action is a force unto itself, as when a suspect is “stabbing and strangling with the madness of a blind animal.” Much of the prose uses Victorian wordiness, which sometimes hinders the narrative; a policeman says, “We are threshing all leads with paramountcy.” Otherwise, Michael squeezes 19th-century London for all the sordid creepiness he can, using dustmen, a psychic, and Highgate Cemetery to amplify his tale. That most of the victims are evil speaks to the theme of self-defined justice, and the finale is suitably explosive.
A thriller that ably rakes through werewolf tropes in search of new territory.Pub Date: March 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-99596-0
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Alistair's Story Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
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An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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