A potent and unsettling tale of a spiritual journey.
In this debut novel, a woman may recover her forgotten past by trekking through an otherworldly forest of beasts and uncanny beings.
Having awakened on a ship at sea, Ohno Hoia can’t remember how or why she’s there. But she does know that she’s transporting “six precious bundles” of mysterious seeds. She hits land in California and stays at a river home, where she plants the seeds and watches her garden grow. But following Ohno from her ship is her shadow, a vicious entity that takes different forms, like a wolf, and which she dubs “It.” While It may be responsible for reports of missing local people and pets, night-blooming roses from the garden ultimately prove harmful to humans. Consequently, Ohno leaves, but even after she joins a traveling circus, It continues to torment her and others. Finally, in an apparent ghost town, Ohno receives a shocking revelation—the start of learning where she came from. To fully realize her origin, she takes a nightmarish excursion through a forest, where she encounters its various inhabitants, from an old witch to a “living corpse” and a hammer-sized dragonfly. Barbelo’s entrancing story steps into territory as dark as the forest. For example, there are biblical allusions, some more conspicuous than others, like the Garden of Eden. Similarly, real-life religious figures make appearances, all within a narrative that’s relentlessly harsh (for example, the disturbing ingredient in the witch’s stew). Nevertheless, the author’s crisp prose gives the harrowing story a poetic, surreal quality that makes the grimness easier to digest. Likewise, frequent metaphors and similes pack a hefty punch: “The pain was beating on her insides like a thousand drums”; “The storm was raging like a rabid beast”; “The wrong name was like a disease that killed you slowly.” Barbelo’s rich, shadowy illustrations highlight the forest’s dreamlike features and eccentric creatures.
A potent and unsettling tale of a spiritual journey. (acknowledgements)Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73532-781-5
Page Count: 494
Publisher: Pleroma Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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