Smart, high-gloss slur of fame, drugs and the fateful weight of family.
A recovering addict, an egomaniacal actor with daddy issues, and an underperforming wannabe make for a particularly LA dysfunctional trio.
At some point soon, we’ll be seeing Wagner (Still Holding, 2003, etc.) writing sitcoms for the WB, but they’ll be the smartest sitcoms that network will have ever seen. Although they share a love/hate of Tinseltown, Wagner’s novels have been slimming down and toning up as their prose evolves from expressing a densely layered and fantastic sensibility to broadcasting on a more realistic and accessible wavelength. Here, the writer has set up a fairly conventional (for him) cast of characters: Bertie Krohn, an actor on a Star Trek–like TV/film franchise created by his dad who dreams of running his own show someday; Clea Freemantle, a once and future druggie and childhood friend of Bertie’s, who finagles her a spot on the show; and Thad Michelet, a manic sort of Robin Williams comic actor oppressed by the fame of his father, literary lion “Black Jack” Michelet. Good and bad intentions alike get badly misconstrued, and some rather ugly family secrets get dragged out into the open against a backdrop of quintessentially Wagnerian Hollywood, rife with hypocritical self-absorption. All the characters are straining to better themselves: narrator Bertie tries to bang out some semblance of a show to pitch to HBO, that mecca of popular quality product; Clea just wants to keep her life from falling into a druggy pit; and Thad fights his way out of Jack’s shadow by publishing some poorly received novels. Thad is an impressively obnoxious character, a pun-spewing ADD pit of insecurity who whips everyone around him into his self-destructive frenzy. All that Bertie, Clea, and the reader can do is hang on and try to make sense of it all. Although Wagner is smart enough to keep the enjoyably soapy story short, the inevitable high-drama conclusion does prompt some longing for the apocalyptic surrealism of his earlier fiction.
Smart, high-gloss slur of fame, drugs and the fateful weight of family.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4339-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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