The whips-and-chains crowd will love it. For others: caveat emptor.
Images of the Marquis de Sade’s bedchamber and Andy Warhol’s Factory will undoubtedly assail readers of this defiantly outré third novel by Gooch, the biographer of Frank O’Hara (City Poet, 1993) and author of such in-your-face fiction as The Golden Age of Promiscuity (1996).
The narrator is a nameless youth from a small Pennsylvania town who finds an objective correlative for his compulsive self-abasement in a Scranton museum’s “sacred voodoo chamber” exhibit. Abused and exploited by schoolmates and others (to whom he is, simply, “Zombie”), he leaves his scandalized, sorrowful parents, and—in a rather blatant imitation of James Purdy’s famous first novel, Malcolm—moves on to New York City. Thereafter, the story becomes a series of searches for his true “master” and encounters with unconventional reality instructors and benefactors: a drug-addicted physician who insists he be addressed as “Sir Edward,” a muscle-bound TV talk-show impresario (“Control Freak”), the Son of God Himself (as worshipped by “the Jesus Men,” who hold a rally in Washington’s RFK Stadium), genuine-article “zombie masters” met during a Haitian visit, and, after Zombie’s return to Manhattan, miscellaneous denizens of the lurid “club Crypt,” where people from his past mysteriously appear. (Perhaps—though Gooch doesn’t spell this out—he’s seeing his life pass before him, just as he’s about to leave it.) The novel isn’t nearly as awful as it sounds: Gooch writes crisp, surprisingly evocative straightforward sentences, and has found a resonant, troubling metaphor for the kind of passivity and self-loathing capable of shading into the destructive recesses of sadomasochism. If you like Anne Tyler and Jan Karon, you may want to pass on Zombie 00. Still, this is, in its uniquely empathetic and perceptive way, really a rather successful exploration of a hapless life lived on the psychosexual razor’s edge.
The whips-and-chains crowd will love it. For others: caveat emptor.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2000
ISBN: 1-58567-043-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.
The third installment of this fantasy series (The Bone Season, 2013; The Mime Order, 2015) expands the reaches of the fight against Scion far beyond London.
Paige Mahoney, though only 19, serves as the Underqueen of the Mime Order. She's the leader of the Unnatural community in London, a city serving under the ever more militaristic Scion, whose government is based on ridding the streets of "enemy" clairvoyants. But Paige knows the truth about Scion's roots—that an Unnatural and immortal race called the Rephaim, who come from the Netherworld, forced Scion into existence to gain control over the growing human clairvoyant community. Scion’s hatred of clairvoyants now runs so deep that Paige is forced to consider moving her entire syndicate into hiding while she aims to stop Scion's next attack: there are rumors that Senshield, a scanner able to detect certain levels of clairvoyance, is going portable. Which means no Unnatural citizen is safe—their safe houses, their back-alley routes, are all at risk of detection. Paige’s main enemy this time around is Hildred Vance, mastermind of Scion’s military branch, ScionIDE. Vance creates terror by anticipating her opponent’s next moves, so with each step that Paige and her team take to dismantle Senshield, Vance is hovering nearby to toy with Paige’s will. Luckily, Paige is never separated for long from her Rephaite ally, Warden, as his presence is grounding. But their growing relationship, strengthened by their connection to the spirit world, takes a back seat to the constant, fast-paced action. The mesmerizing qualities of this series—insight into the different orders of clairvoyance as well as the intricately imagined details of Paige’s “dreamwalking” gift, with which she is able to enter others’ minds—fade to the background as this seven-part series climbs to its highest point of tension. Shannon’s world begins to feel more generically dystopian, but as Paige fights to locate and understand the spiritual energy powering Senshield, it is never less than captivating.
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-624-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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